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plaining knotty passages about Prometheus being bound on a rock all alone (how I envied him!), or pointing out defective figures about x+y being equal to z, though why I could not clearly see-even then, under such powerful protection, my future fate as fag and butt, scout and victim of the school, flashed upon me.

After Mr. Wentworth had returned to his study, I had to wait in the school-room till lessons were over, and we were all set at liberty. During this miserable interval, not one friendly face greeted me, not one kind smile cheered me, as I sat, wretched and forlorn, on a bench near the door. I alone was unoccupied-except by the dreariness of my own position, and it was some relief when at last school broke up.

About two dozen boys rushed towards me. ?" asked one.

66 What's

your name

"You sha'n't sleep in my room," said another. "it's full already."

"He shall be my slavey," said a bigger boy who was passing; " and let's make him fight we've not had a fight for a month, and new boys always must show the stuff they're made of.”

The usher on duty had naturally gone out for a few moments, to refresh himself after the hard day's teaching, and all government was at an end. The fight accordingly began; my small opponent and I were of course so utterly opposed to this trial of strength, that we fought with but small energy, and our exertions were mainly confined to not hurting one another at all. This was considered a very unsatisfactory state of matters by the boys, who wished to revive the gladiatorial combats of Rome among the new boys of Elmhouse; therefore sundry pushes and blows from third parties quite made up for the small punishment each of us received from his opponent.

In about twenty minutes the footsteps of the returning usher were heard, when every one at once assumed an extremely uninterested and nonchalant look; and the usher, seeing me crying, but every one else conducting themselves with extreme propriety, came up and kindly inquired what was the matter. The notion had been duly instilled into me that on no account was I to tell tales, and the first well-defined deceit or direct untruth which I remember to have been guilty of

C

was answering Mr. Rush with the usual schoolboy reply,-"Nothing."

Somebody wrote a humorous essay the other day on the two words "Never mind;" an equally witty composition could easily be made of the answer "Nothing." One of the bottle-holders in the late encounter seemed to be troubled with no such thin-skinned scruples, as he boldly volunteered to remark, "Oh, Mr. Rush, don't mind him: he's crying because he is a new boy." I remember remarking once to a friend who was stigmatizing the moral feeling of public schools as low, that I had been two years at Harby before I heard a deliberate lie told to a master, and that for "two years" he might read "one hour" as my experience of private schools.

CHAPTER III.

ELM-HOUSE.

"Schuler.-Ich bitt' euch, nehmt euch meiner an!
Ich komme mit allem guten Muth,

Leidlichem Geld und frischem Blut;
Meine Mutter wollte mich kaum entfernen

Möchte gern' was rechts hieraussen lernen." "Mephistopheles.—Da seyd ihr eben recht am Ort.”

GOETHE,

We were about fifty in number, and I was one of the smallest of them; that was very speedily demonstrated to me by finding myself thrashed and bullied by any boy who was in want of an occupation, and who found me a more amusing object of persecution than another little victim who was my partner in tribulation. There were three ushers during part of my stay at Elm-house, and only two the rest of the time; they were nominally present

among us all day; but this, like most theories, was widely different from the practice; which was that we were generally left to our own devices, the ushers preferring one another's society, or that of the elder boys, and not often concerning themselves about those who were always in trouble, and whose conversation consisted in lamentations and complaints, not to say reproaches and taunts.

One of the ushers was a capital fellow, but he took rather the position of a big boy amongst us than that of a master, and his punishments were corporeal in the roughest sense of the word. He was a fine, strong man, one of those whose manners might be conjectured from the cut of his clothes, which were of the description hinted at in a late number of the Examiner as one in which

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centrifugal force seems energetically in operation, and every thing is flying away." His heart might be estimated from his deep, manly, joyous voice, and was equally large and noble. What a bully he was, to be sure! How vigorously he fell upon any of our many persecutors, whom he happened to catch in the fact! He counselled us to pluck up spirit and retaliate

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