Work by P. G. Wodehouse — Read

With a pleasure that's emphatic / We retire to our attic / With the satisfying feeling that our duty has been done. / Oh! philosophers may sing / Of the troubles of a king / But of pleasures there are many and of troubles there are none, / And the culminating pleasure / Which we treasure beyond measure / Is the satisfying feeling that our duty has been done. / W. S. Gilbert

Work is supposed to be the centre round which school life revolves -- the hub of the school wheel, the lodestar of the schoolboy's existence, and a great many other things. "You come to school to work," is the formula used by masters when sentencing a victim to the wailing and gnashing of teeth provided by two hours' extra tuition on a hot afternoon. In this, I think, they err, and my opinion is backed up by numerous scholars of my acquaintance, who have even gone so far -- on occasions when they themselves have been the victims -- as to express positive disapproval of the existing state of things. In the dear, dead days (beyond recall), I used often to long to put the case to my form-master in its only fair aspect, but always refrained from motives of policy. Masters are so apt to take offence at the well-meant endeavours of their form to instruct them in the way they should go.