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MY SCHOOL DAYS
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out of the other,' unheeded and soon forgotten, with the incredible heedlessness of early youth. Yet how strangely accurate has been the fulfilment of these long-past warnings. Among us then stood in embryo a Chief Justice, since eminent among high legal authorities, dying in proved possession of a massive intellect, a wide-reaching grasp of principles, a rapid faculty of generalisation which will ever cause his memory to be revered and his decisions to be quoted; three puisne judges, all of whom have earned the respect of men for legal attainment and unswerving impartiality; a Right Honourable Privy Councillor of our Gracious Sovereign, whose Jubilee (now that half a century has rolled by since Hugh Ranclaud and I, arms crony-like about each other's necks, heard the Proclamation of her majority read under the oaks of Macquarie Place) received a world-wide celebration. A Privy Councillor, moreover, whose privilege it was, by one act of statesmanlike inspiration, to nationalise Australia and to immortalise himself.

Alfred Stephen became a clergyman, always a hard-working, conscientious parish priest, beloved by his parishioners. He died in harness. Poor Connie, when I saw him many a year after his schoolboy days, was no longer handsome and careless, but as an eminent solicitor, and thus chained to the Bench, a galley-slave of the law, comparatively war-worn of visage. And pray what are we all in middle life but the bond-slaves, scarcely disguised, of some form of ownership which we dignify with the name of Circumstance? He and his brother Matthew Henry were in the House of Assembly at one time, thus justifying the prophecy as to the school being the nursery of future legislators.

Sir James Martin was Her Majesty's Attorney-General, and afterwards Chief-Justice William Forster was in more than one Ministry. Allan Macpherson was for many years regularly returned to Parliament. Sir George Wigram Allen, the steadiest of workers at school, again kept close to Hood's humorous declaration—

Each little boy at Enfield School
Became an 'Enfield's Speaker.'

He, with the Honourable James Norton, his neighbour and class-fellow, but continued unchanged the steadfastness and success of his school record. With one's schoolfellows the