big enough to eat him, with the assurance of a gamecock defying an emu. He lost the fight, of course; but no other boy of his size in the school would have thought of commencing it. He had been at sea for a year, and was thereby enabled to tell us wonderful tales of his adventures among the South Sea Islands—much after the fashion of 'Jack Harkaway,' who, however, like gas in the time of Guy Fawkes, 'wasn't then inwented.' In after-years a report was current among us that he was lost at sea. Whether true or not I am unable to say. He certainly was, with the exception of Garden Collins, the most utterly fearless boy I ever saw.
Of course, with so large a school, under masters were required. These gentlemen were excellent teachers and conscientious disciplinarians. First came Mr. Murray, the English and arithmetical master; then Mr. O'Brien, writing master and teacher of mathematics. He had a way of saying, when arrived at the Q.E.D. of a problem in Euclid, 'And the thing is done.' How well I remember his desk and the pen he was always mending! No steel pens in those days. We had to learn to mend our own quill pens and keep them in good order. If the pens were bad and the writing suffered thereby, we suffered in person. This led to the careful preparation of the obsolete goose-quill—now a figure of speech, a thing of the past.
The Rev. Mr. Woolls was for a year or more classical master. He afterwards went to Parramatta and established himself independently. A fair-haired, ruddy-faced, Kingsley-looking young Englishman was he when he first came to Sydney College. He was the ideal tutor, and most popular with us all: strict in school, but full of life and gaiety when lessons were over.
The late Reverend David Boyd, afterwards of East Maitland, a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, succeeded him. He was an accomplished person if you like: a first-rate classical scholar, with a fair knowledge of French, German, and Italian—possibly Hebrew, for he knew pretty well everything, from astronomy to single-stick, fencing to comparative philology. He rode, drove, shot, fished, painted, was musical, mathematical—a mesmerist doubtless. 'Omnibus rebus et quibusdem aliis' ought to have been his motto. We boys looked upon him as a successor of the Admirable
