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over there corresponds to our prep school; it is a place maintained chiefly by endowments, wherein boys of the upper classes are prepared for the universities. What we know as a public school is called a board school or council school in England, not because the pupils are boarded but because it is managed by a school board or county council. The boys in a public (i. e., private) school are divided, not into classes, or grades, but into forms, which are numbered, the lowest being the first form. The benches they sit on are also called forms. An English boy whose father is unable to pay for his education goes first into a babies’ class (a kindergarten is always a private school) in a primary or infants’ school. He moves thence to class one, class two, class three and class four, and then into the junior school or public elementary school, where he enters the first standard. Until now boys and girls have sat together in class, but hereafter they are separated, the boy going to a boys’ school and the girl to a girls’. He goes up a standard a year. At the third or fourth standard, for the first time, he is put under a male teacher. He reaches the seventh standard, if he is bright, at the age of 12, and then goes into what is known as the ex-seventh. If he stays at school after this he goes into the ex-ex-seventh. But many leave the public elementary school at the ex-seventh and go into the secondary school, which is what Americans call a high-school. “The lowest class in a secondary school,” says an English correspondent, “is known as the third form. In this class the boy from the public elementary school meets boys from private preparatory schools, who usually have an advantage over him, being armed with the Greek alphabet, the first twenty pages of ‘French Without Tears,’ the fact that Balbus built a wall, and the fact that lines equal to the same line are equal to one another. But usually the public elementary school boy conquers these disabilities by the end of his first high-school year, and so wins a place in the upper fourth form, while his wealthier competitors grovel in the lower fourth. In schools where the fagging system prevails the fourth is the lowest form that is fagged. The lower fifth is the retreat of the unscholarly. The sixth form is the highest. Those who fail in their matriculation for universities or who wish to study for the civil

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