The Upton Letters | Page 6

can be weighed for a moment in the balance with those simple qualities of human nature which the humblest being may admire, win, and display.--Ever yours,
T. B.

UPTON, Shrove Tuesday, Feb. 16, 1904.
DEAR HERBERT,--One of those incredible incidents has just happened here, an incident that makes one feel how little one knows of human beings, and that truth, in spite of the conscientious toil of Mr. H. G. Wells, does still continue to keep ahead of fiction. Here is the story. Some money is missed in a master's house; circumstances seem to point to its having been abstracted by one of the boys. A good-natured, flighty boy is suspected, absolutely without reason, as it turns out; though he is the sort of boy to mislay his own books and other portable property to any extent, and to make no great difficulty under pressure of immediate need, and at the last moment, about borrowing some one else's chattels. On this occasion the small boys in the house, of whom he is one, solemnly accuse him of the theft, and the despoiled owner entreats that the money may be returned. He protests that he has not taken it. The matter comes to the ears of the house-master, who investigates the matter in the course of the evening, and interviews the supposed culprit. The boy denies it again quite unconcernedly and frankly, goes away from the interview, and wandering about, finds the small boys of the house assembled in one of the studies discussing a matter with great interest. "What has happened?" says our suspected friend. "Haven't you heard?" says one of them; "Campbell's grandmother" (Campbell is another of the set) "has sent him a tip of L2." "Oh, has she?" says the boy, with a smile of intense meaning; "I shall have to go my rounds again." This astonishing confession of his guilt is received with the interest it deserves, and Campbell is advised to lock up his money, or to hand it over to the custody of the house-master. In the course of the evening another amazing event occurs; the boy whose money was stolen finds the whole of it, quite intact, in the pocket of his cricketing flannels, where he now remembers having put it. The supposed culprit is restored to favour, and becomes a reliable member of society. One of the small boys tells the matron the story of our hero's amazing remark on the subject, in his presence. The matron stares at him, bewildered, and asks him what made him say it. "Oh, only to rag them," says the boy; "they were all so excited about it." "But don't you see, you silly boy," says the kind old dame, "that if the money had not been found, you would have been convicted out of your own mouth of having been the thief?" "Oh yes," says the boy cheerfully; "but I couldn't help it- -it came into my head."
Of course this is an exceptional case; but it illustrates a curious thing about boys--I mentioned it the other day--which is, their extraordinary willingness and even anxiety to be thought worse than they are. Even boys of unexceptionable principle will talk as if they were not only not particular, but positively vicious. They don't like aspersions on their moral character to be made by others, but they rejoice to blacken themselves; and not even the most virtuous boys can bear to be accused of virtue, or thought to be what is called "Pi." This does not happen when boys are by themselves; they will then talk unaffectedly about their principles and practice, if their interlocutor is also unaffected. But when they are together, a kind of disease of self-accusation attacks them. I suppose that it is the perversion of a wholesome instinct, the desire not to be thought better than they are; but part of the exaggerated stories that one hears about the low moral tone of public schools arises from the fact that innocent boys coming to a public school infer, and not unreasonably, from the talk of their companions that they are by no means averse to evil, even when, as is often the case, they are wholly untainted by it.
The same thing seems to me to prevail very widely nowadays. The old-fashioned canting hypocrisy, like that of the old servant in the Master of Ballantrae, who, suffering under the effects of drink, bears himself like a Christian martyr, has gone out; just as the kind of pride is extinct against which the early Victorian books used to warn children, and which was manifested by sitting in a carriage surveying a beggar with a curling lip--a course of action which was invariably followed by the breaking of a Bank, or by some mysterious financial operation involving an entire loss of