We even
carried on war, class against class, in those wild, precious minutes.
A watcher gave the alarm when the master opened his house-door to
return, and it was a great feat to get into our places before he
entered, adorned in awful majestic authority, shouting "Silence!" and
striking resounding blows with his cane on a desk or on some
unfortunate scholar's back.
Forty-seven years after leaving this fighting school, I returned on a
visit to Scotland, and a cousin in Dunbar introduced me to a minister
who was acquainted with the history of the school, and obtained for me
an invitation to dine with the new master. Of course I gladly
accepted, for I wanted to see the old place of fun and pain, and the
battleground on the sands. Mr. Lyon, our able teacher and thrasher, I
learned, had held his place as master of the school for twenty or
thirty years after I left it, and had recently died in London, after
preparing many young men for the English Universities. At the
dinner-table, while I was recalling the amusements and fights of my
old schooldays, the minister remarked to the new master, "Now, don't
you wish that you had been teacher in those days, and gained the honor
of walloping John Muir?" This pleasure so merrily suggested showed
that the minister also had been a fighter in his youth.
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