Education: Twill

To the world at large, the headmasters of three famed New England private schools are Dr. Samuel Smith Drury (St. Paul's School, Concord, N. H.), the Rev. Endicott Peabody (Groton School, Groton, Mass.) and Dr. William Greenough Thayer of St. Mark's School (Southborough, Mass.). To thousands of affectionate graduates, hundreds of respectful schoolboys, they are and always will be known respectively as "The Drip," "Pee-bo," and "Twill." St. Marksmen were saddened to learn last week that "Twill" had resigned. He will leave his post before the autumn. Headmaster "Twill" has earned his rest. For 36 of the school's 64 years he has managed and governed St. Mark's, punished and rewarded socialite children, dealt tactfully with agitated parents, wangled needful endowments from graduates. After being graduated by Amherst in 1885, attending the Union Theological Seminary and Episcopal Theological School (Cambridge), he was ordained an Episcopal minister. For five years before being called to the headmastership of St. Mark's, he taught at Groton School, old-lime St. Mark's rival. Every St. Marksman knows that the football jerseys of "Grotties" are laterally striped in black and white. Should the Groton game be won, crepe is hung upon a stuffed zebra at the lower end of the St. Mark's dining hall where all can gloat over the shame of the Groton mule. Just as Eton has its "fives" (a handball game played between the buttresses and against the walls of Eton chapel), so St. Mark's has its "cloister ball." Each evening after supper students swarm to the open cloister which bounds the fourth side of St. Mark's brick-and-timber quadrangle. A tennis ball is thrown across one of the iron tie-rods in the cloister roof, the object being to strike the succeeding tie-rod, catch the ball on the rebound. Historic are St. Marksmen who make a perfect score of 15 hits in 15 throws. Founded mainly with Joseph Burnett's money (vanilla, Deerfoot Farms), St. Mark's in the words of the school prayer, has had "rich gifts bestowed upon it, and its courts thronged with youth." Deer-foot Farms are located in Southborough, and when the wind is in the right quarter Third Formers, whose dormitory faces East, are made well aware of their late benefactor's sausage plant.* So that St. Mark's boys may be further pork-conscious, each year on Founder's Day suckling pig is served. Eight or ten times in the school year Headmaster Thayer leaves school to marry his alumni. Imposing is his record at socialite weddings, for loyal St. Mark's grooms will have no other cleric. Literate St. Marksmen remember his fondness for Robert Burns, whose poetry he reads to favorites. On Sundays before Christmas he reads Dickens' Christmas Carol to Upper Formers, who crowd the window seat and fender rail of his booklined study. "Old Boys" * fondly recall his habit of snorting humorously through his nose, his ceaseless jiggling of his Phi Beta Kappa key. Of his five sons, most spectacular is the second-eldest, Sigourney Thayer, World War aviator, Paris habitue, theatre tyro, husband of Emily Davies Vanderbilt.