Centuries ago, when scarcely a street-full of
wooden houses formed a village where now
stands the city of Noughtenborough, when
the river used to flood the country ad libitum,
and when monasteries were in their flourishing
state, there lived a certain widow, who
had long since lost her husband in one battle
somewhere, and all her sons in other battles
elsewhere. Bowed down with grief, her only
solace was the society of her daughter, the
fairest flower of the whole neighbourhood for
miles around, but whose youthful countenance
bore sad marks of early sorrow. Many had
wooed her, but she clung to her mother; and
daughter and mother lived on their life of
mourning till age and grief began to make
them more alike. They might have been
thought sisters in years, as well as in sadness.

Wealth, abundant wealth, was theirs, and
charity, the truest, the noblest, and the most
unlimited, proclaimed the fact. Religion,
deepened by grief, but not degraded into
abject superstition, had adorned the monastery
of Noughtenborough with a hundred
testimonies of taste and liberality, while poverty
of every kind found relief proportionate to
its deserts and its exigencies.

But in all their deeds of charity, the ladies
St. Bridget's Mount had nothing so much at
heart as the education of the most promising
boys in their neighbourhood. Perhaps in the
mind of the mother there arose some
recollection of the noble youths whom she had
seen speed forth in full steel, never to return,
but to breathe out a last longing for a mother's
blessing, while the horses of their retreating
foes trod their corses on the battle-field.
Perhaps the daughter bethought her of the
return of her last remaining brother, pale
and wounded; how she had held the water
to his lips, bathed his parched forehead with
her tears, and how he had laid his heavy head
in her arms, and slept for ever. Perhaps it
was such sad, such holy recollections, that
made both the friends of every blooming boy
they met, that wiped the tears of weeping
and delinquent urchins, and that founded the
school of St. Laura in Noughtenborough.

Attached to the monastery, the school was
of limited extent and endowment, but suited
to the wants of the times. When ploughing
was more fashionable than reading, and fighting
more popular than either, no one would have
expected a London University or King's
College in a place like Noughteuborough. But,
as the magnificent cathedral rose out of the
humble monastery, as fighting gave place to
human pursuits, and as refinement
proportionately increased, the number of the "to
be educated" had increased in a correspondingly
extensive ratio.

Such was, briefly, the history of the school
now attached to the cathedral church of St.
Laura, Noughtenborough. The Dean and
Canons, who had stepped into the enjoyment
of plenty of the old property of the monastery,
were quiet, inoffensive people, dropped into
good berths out of close fellowships, lucky
tutorships to "nobs," or the happy chance of
being related to a Bishop. They lived well,
died highly respected, and their places were
gladly taken by new comers like themselves.
In fact, they were all alike. No one ever
missed one of them, for if prosperity and
port took him suddenly away, the new comer
was so like that no one found any difference.
They paid their stated guinea, or five pounds,
to particular charities, put a sovereign instead
of a shilling into the offertory, preached
drowsy sermons on Sunday, and had large
families of children, all with exemplary and
methodical regularity. In fact, they were all
copies of the last — all rubbings of the same
brass; all equally black, grotesque, and
imperturbable.

Among other "regularities" of this worthy
order, their visit to the school-house twice a
year was an important event. The Dean
appeared in his full canonicals, the Canons in
theirs, the boys conjugated and parsed, and
all was ''perfectly satisfactory." But there
were still only the same number of boys on
the foundation, and "twelve poore boyes"
alone received the benefit of the education
provided by the pious ladies St. Bridget's
Mount. The master was permitted to receive
other boys as day scholars at an extra charge,
and, as the original salary was only forty
pounds a year, and he got much more by the
day scholars, he neglected the others in
proportion. In fact, the day scholars looked upon
the foundation scholars as a respectable kind
of  "charity boys."

Often had our kind-hearted Mayor lamented
the unimproved and neglected condition of
the school, and sadly had he contrasted its
present state with the intentions contemplated
by its pious and kindly founders. Clearly did
he calculate how great ought to have been
the means of education now at the command
of the townspeople, had the money, left for
that purpose, increased in the same manner
as the incomes of the Bishop, the Dean, and
the Chapter. But, with all his careful investigation
of documents, his anxious searching
into history, nothing satisfactory rewarded
his labours. History appeared to be
conveniently deficient just where a connecting
link was most wanting; abuses seemed to
have grown up and vegetated in hearty freshness,
with a kind of tacit consent, and
certainly without any visible opposition. One
office suddenly disappeared, and the incomes
of other offices suddenly became larger;
buildings were removed, and private residences
enlarged. Minor canonries subsided into
paltry chaplaincies, and, in a word, the history
of cathedrals seemed to be like that of the
ocean, in which the large fish were
continually swallowing up the small.

Nor was the question of law much better.
In the face of enactments against pluralities,
our Mayor could not discover a single Dean
or Canon who did not hold at least one other