He now discovered that Mrs. Simpson was the real head of the school. All stood in awe of this redoubtable woman, and Clarke says, "I feared her more than I feared Satan himself." The following indicates the disorganization of the school:

In several respects each did what was right in his own eyes. There was no efficient plan pursued; they mocked at religion, and trampled under foot all the laws. The little children of the preachers suffered great indignities; and, it is to be feared, their treatment there gave many of them a rooted enmity against religion for life. The parlor boarders had every kind of respect paid to them, and the others were shamefully neglected. Scarcely any care was taken either of their bodies or souls. Clarke's verdict probably influenced Wesley, who changed the masters and was able at last to rejoice that all the rules were observed and the children in good order. In 1786 he says: "I walked over to Kingswood school, now one of the pleasantest spots in England. I found all things just according to my desire, the rules being well observed, and the whole behavior of the children showing that they were now managed with the wisdom that cometh from above."

The preachers' sons were now beginning to push out the lay boarders. The Conference of 1788 resolved to raise the number of the first to forty and to reduce the boarders to ten. About six years later Kingswood became exclusively a school for preachers' sons. Joseph Bradford, Wesley's former traveling companion-who had nursed the old evangelist with filial tenderness, and repeated the words, "Lift up your heads, O ye gates; and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors; and this heir of glory shall come in," as the founder of Methodism escaped to the skies-was governor of Kingswood from 1795 to 1802. An "old boy" used to describe how the tall and gaunt governor stalked into the dormitory in the early mornings and with one stroke of his oaken staff on the floor roused the youthful sleepers. Then, watch in hand, he marked off three minutes, at the end of which all the boys were expected to be sufficiently dressed to kneel down for their devotions. They washed in a long, low gallery open to the raw air, so that the old prayer was not offered in vain,

Train up thy hardy soldiers, Lord,
In all their Captain's steps to tread!

Pocket money, one finds from the accounts, was given to the little fellows, and when he left the school each boy had six new shirts, six new pairs of stockings, two pairs of shoes, two hats, pocket-handkerchiefs, and other articles.

Kingswood sometimes furnished a welcome shelter for a broken-down preacher such as William Stevens, who was appointed writing and English master in 1802. A small dirty cottage was all that could be provided for him at short notice, and here he had to begin life again without a spoon or a single article of furniture. Besides his scholastic duties he opened a druggist and stationery shop and did duty as a medical practitioner in the district. He afterward started a boarding and day school in Kingswood, toward which the Conference gave him a grant from the Preachers' Merciful Fund.

The first prize list that has been preserved-that for January, 1819-contains the name of James Moulton, who received Homer's Iliad as his prize. His father was a Wesleyan minister, and he himself entered the ranks in 1828, and left four sons-William Fiddian, who became head master of the Leys; James Egan, President of New South Wales Conference in 1893; John Fletcher, the distinguished Q. C., who was senior wrangler in 1868; and Richard Green, professor at Chicago University. Another prize winner was William Maclardie Bunting, son of the famous Dr. Bunting, who became one of the most accomplished men in the Methodist ministry.

The Rev. John Lomas became a junior assistant at Kingswood in 1813, with a salary of sixteen guineas. Three years later it was resolved by the committee that he should be examined by Dr. Clarke, Joseph Benson, and McHorner, with a view to testing his fitness for the post of classical master. Another was preferred before him, but in 1819 he was appointed. He was a "universal favorite, an admirable scholar, and, if not a strict disciplinarian, one who allowed no liberties to be taken with his authority." When he left Kingswood the chapel choir sang an anthem in which the refrain, " Farewell, Lomas," occurred again and again. To stand in the pulpit facing the boys during this performance must have been one of the trying passages of John Lomas's life. Another worthy of a different stamp was the Rev. Robert Smith, governor from 1820

to 1843. Dame Smith was a wonderful housekeeper, of whom one old scholar wrote:

Her horror at any misbehavior of the boys in regard to the property of the school was one of the features of the place. The lads often tried for fun, from the bedroom windows overlooking the garden, how far their nightcaps would be blown-everyone wore nightcaps in those days. When recovered from the trees and cabbages of the garden Dame's invariable exclamation came dolefully ringing out, "O, those wicked lads! they'll ruin the institution!"

With the Rev. Jonathan Crowther, appointed head master in 1823, "came the rod of iron, fear, indignation, and finally rebellion." He seems to have acted like a tyrant. One boy whose red and swollen face caused some merriment among his schoolfellows was flogged there and then for making a disturbance. He was found to be suffering from erysipelas, and "when the nurse and Mrs. Smith and her daughters heard " of the lad's punishment they all wept. On a later occasion the same boy stumbled in his Cæsar, and was goaded into rudeness by Mr. Crowther's taunts. He was put across a desk and beaten so severely that for several days he could hardly walk or sit. Some years later, when the boy became a minister, Mr. Crowther remarked, "Ah! I gave that young gentleman as fine a flogging as any boy at school ever received, and one that I have no doubt he will remember to the very end of his days." Yet even under this rule of terror the preachers' boys were not cowed. One merry lad was challenged to defy the head master. "Charlie, I'll give you a penny if you'll go up to his desk and offer to fight him." The offer was promptly accepted, and of course secured a sound thrashing.

There was a famine of love at Kingswood, and the small fellow who had left mother and sisters often felt himself utterly desolate. Says one of the former boys:

True there was Dame Smith; but she seemed centuries off, and never spoke to us unless, in true shopkeeper fashion, she sold us sweets once a week. There was Miss Smith, too, but her duties did not lie our way. I remember how we little boys yearned for a look from her, and if she ever smiled on one of us the favored one ran off with raptures to boast of it to the rest.

The rule forbidding play had been rescinded after Wesley's death, but a strange incapacity for understanding a boy's na

ture still lingered. One lad was publicly expelled because he had twice visited his widowed mother without leave. She lived close by in Bristol, so that the offense was not heinous, yet the chairman of the school committee in pronouncing sentence angrily addressed the culprit as "you dastardly coward." Wesley's school had been enlarged in 1828, at a cost of £2,194, so as to take one hundred boys. But the laymen of Methodism felt that it was pitifully inadequate for a great connection, and in June, 1850, the foundation stone of New Kingswood was laid by Mr. James Heald, M. P., at Bath. It was hard to leave a spot that was laden with associations. It was found, however, that it would cost six or eight thousand pounds to patch up the old place, and even then the long-standing difficulty of the water supply would have to be faced. It was a wise decision to spend £16,000 on a new school, and Kingswood has enjoyed rare success in its present splendid position on Lansdown Hill. Generous benefactors, like John Cannington, of Liverpool, have added many a happy finishing touch. Mr. Cannington's right foot, hand, and eye had been touched by paralysis, and he was for forty years a crippled man, but he was never more at home than among the Kingswood boys, and became their most popular visitor. He always left a ten-pound note to provide them with bacon for breakfast; he gave £1,000 to provide a ten-acre playing field, and £420 to build another story over the kitchen for the better housing of the servants. "He liked no part of his visits better than the daily prayers in the hall; his favorite tunes were sung, and all sang their best. As the boys passed out their names were whispered to him. It is like reading the stations,' he would say," the preachers he had long known through the list of appointments being represented in their sons.

The Rev. Theophilus Woolmer, who became governor in 1857, is gratefully remembered for many gracious measures which tempered the old régime. He distributed apples from his own garden, and opened that enchanted realm on Sunday afternoons to the boys. He allowed unlimited supplies of bread, and substituted hash for the Saturday dinner of bread and cheese. To this last reform he devoted his entire salary of one hundred pounds a year, and it was found impossible to

revert to the bread and cheese after his departure. The fame of Mr. T. G. Osborn as head master has become part of the glories of Kingswood. He was tenth wrangler and a fellow of Trinity Hall. Mr. Fawcett, the postmaster general, once said of him to Sir Henry Fowler, "You Methodist people have an enormons advantage in having such a man to train your ministers' sons."

Dr. Jowett, the great master of Balliol, once expressed his pleasure at receiving Kingswood boys at his college in Oxford, because "they were not all cut to one pattern." Dr. Rigg was here as boy and master. Dr. Moulton was trained at Woodhouse Grove, as also was Sir Henry Fowler, but his three brothers, one of whom was a brilliant senior wrangler, were all Kingswood boys. The present head master, W. W. W. Workman, was second wrangler and Smith's prizeman; the three sons of the present governor, the Rev. Wesley Brunyale, were ornaments of Kingswood, and one of them was second wrangler in 1888. One of the most successful scholars ever turned out by Kingswood was Alfred Cardew Dixon, who in 1878, at the age of thirteen, took the first place in the first class at the Junior Oxford Local; next year he held the same position in the Senior Oxford, and the following year in the Senior Cambridge. In January, 1882, he headed the London matriculation list, securing in other examinations there the mathematical exhibition, the scholarship and the gold medal in the mathematical branch of the M. A. examination. In 1883 he won the first open scholarship at Trinity College, Cambridge, and in 1886 was senior wrangler. He is now professor of mathematics in Galway.

This brief survey will show that John Wesley's zeal for education has been nobly rewarded. Kingswood school had to face many a storm, but it has weathered them all, and was never more solidly prosperous or more full of promise than it is to-day, when it has just celebrated its third jubilee. "Three Old Boys" have just written the history of their school, and from it are drawn the facts here given.

довитсядать