E-text prepared by Al Haines
A Romance of Friendship
by
London
John Murray, Albemarle Street
First Edition . . . . . . . . . . . April, 1905
Thirty-second Impression (3/6) . . . April, 1928
Reprinted (2/-) . . . . . . . . . . November, 1928
Reprinted . . . . . . . . . . . . . September, 1930
Reprinted . . . . . . . . . . . . . June, 1935
Reprinted . . . . . . . . . . . . . October, 1937
To
I dedicate this Romance of Friendship to you with the sincerestpleasure and affection. You were the first to suggest that I shouldwrite a book about contemporary life at Harrow; you gave me theprincipal idea; you have furnished me with notes innumerable; you haverevised every page of the manuscript; and you are a peculiarly keenHarrovian.
In making this public declaration of my obligations to you, I take theopportunity of stating that the characters in "The Hill," whethermasters or boys, are not portraits, although they may be called,truthfully enough, composite photographs; and that the episodes ofDrinking and Gambling are founded on isolated incidents, not onhabitual practices. Moreover, in attempting to reproduce the curiousadmixture of "strenuousness and sentiment"—your own phrase—whichanimates so vitally Harrow life, I have been obliged to select the lesscommon types of Harrovian. Only the elect are capable of suchfriendship as John Verney entertained for Henry Desmond; and few boys,happily, are possessed of such powers as Scaife is shown to exercise.But that there are such boys as Verney and Scaife, nobody knows betterthan yourself.
Believe me,
Yours most gratefully,
February 22, 1905.
"Five hundred faces, and all so strange!
Life in front of me—home behind,
I felt like a waif before the wind
Tossed on an ocean of shock and change.
"Chorus. Yet the time may come, as the years go by,
When your heart will thrill
At the thought of the Hill,
And the day that you came so strange and shy."
The train slid slowly out of Harrow station.
Five minutes before, a man and a boy had been walking up and down thelong platform. The boy wondered why the man, his uncle, was sostrangely silent. Then, suddenly, the elder John Verney had placed hishands upon the shoulders of the younger John, looking down into eyes asgrey and as steady as his own.
"You'll find plenty of fellows abusing Harrow," he said quietly; "buttake it from me, that the fault lies not in Harrow, but in them. Suchboys, as a rule, do not come out of the top drawer. Don't look sosolemn. You're about to take a header into a big river. In it arerocks and rapids; but you know how to swim, and after the first plungeyo