CHAPTER III.
BULLYING "Give to the morn of life its natural blessedness." Wordsworth.
Why is it that new boys are almost invariably ill-treated?
I have often fancied that there must be in boyhood a pseudo-instinctive cruelty, a sort of "wild trick of the ancestral savage," which, no amount of civilization can entirely repress.

Certain it is, that to most boys the first term is a trying ordeal.

They are being tested and weighed.

Their place in the general estimation is not yet fixed, and the slightest circumstances are seized upon to settle the category under which the boy is to be classed.

A few apparently trivial accidents of his first few weeks at school often decide his position in the general regard for the remainder of his boyhood.