[All rights reserved]

This is a school story; but Chiltern Schoolhas yet to be founded and the masters andboys who figure in the following pages havenever existed outside the author’s brain.It is necessary to say so much, partly becausemost stories of this kind have admittedlydealt with particular schools, and partlybecause many readers have very little ideaof the workings of the imaginative faculty.At all events, when a professional manventures to write fiction, they insist onseeing history or caricature, and proceed toaffix labels; for there is a general assumptionthat professional men, and schoolmastersin particular, are necessarily devoid ofimagination.

Once more then, Chiltern is not a realschool and its masters are not real masters.But, though not real, they are not impossible—at[vi]least, so the author believes. Formen, like boys, are unconsciously mouldedby their environment and tend to conformto types; and, given a school like Chiltern,there would probably be masters like theChiltern masters.

G. F. B.

    June, 1913.