the young gentleman was placed, (O, Midas!
Midas!) and therefore was not in a position
to hear him."

"And I," observed Mr. Janty, with a bow,
"happened to have my back towards him,
—inadvertently, however, believe me— and
therefore was not in a position to see him."

I knew that both these two gentlemen
were telling lies, and it devolved upon
me— to whom the colonel turned somewhat
impatiently—to contradict their evidence.
Walpole had been crying all school-time, as
most boys of eight years with the small bone
of their right arm broken, would probably
do; and I said so.

"This is, as you remarked, Doctor
Dumplin," said the colonel, when I had
finished, " a mere matter of evidence.
There has been a falsehood told, most
certainly, either by yourself and your ushers
on the one hand, or by my boy and his
companion on the other. You are a
clergyman, and those persons are under your
control, so I say no more. For you, young
gentleman," he added, turning to the monitor,
"if I did not feel that you were in some sort
a slave to a vicious system yourself, be
assured that, before I took my son away from
this school — which I shall do now and at
once — I would thrash you as long as I could
stand over you, with this cane; " which
indeed I should have liked to have seen him
do exceedingly.

The next day I broke down, somehow, in
a particularly well-conned task of mine
before the head-master; and " I exceedingly
regret," said Mr. Midas, " that I must
substitute bread and water for your dinner
to-day, and deprive you of your week's
pocket-money also, at the instigation of Doctor
Dumplin." When I complained to Janty
of the injustice of my sentence, he replied,
poking up his hair, that perhaps I had got up
my lesson too well, and that over-accuracy
was sometimes injudicious.

At this same school, a Monsieur Lucien,
the French master and a Roman Catholic,
suffered the torments, at the very least, of
purgatory. He had served under Napoleon,
and was accustomed, upon great festivals, to
wear a dingy yellow ribband in his button-
hole—an order of merit which it was understood
had been bestowed upon him by the
emperor's own hands; and the emperor and
the order and the Roman Catholic religion
were the three themes which the boys chose
for their pleasant satire.

"Would Monsieur Lucy (Anglicè for
Lucien) be so very kind as to state once again
the circumstances under which he had
obtained his reward of bravery? Was it true
that the great Bonaparte had laid himself
down upon his stomach in the long grass at
Waterloo, pretending to be dead, and that he
had eventually escaped disguised as a daughter
of the regiment, in short petticoats, with a
parasol? Was it Monsieur Lucy's serious
conviction that the whole of us boys, being
Protestants, would pass a considerable portion
of time in the infernal regions?

"I do hope and trust that you all may,
mon Dieu! " was wont to be his fervent and
not unnatural reply.

"What! " added we, " and Doctor Dumplin
too? Do you hope that he may be so
treated?"

"Ah, well!" replied Monsieur Lucy, with
a twinkle of his single eye, " the good doctor,
he will, I do not doubt, have his reward."
Which answer used to delight us
excessively, and made Monsieur Lucien popular
for several minutes.

At the great cramming school for
Sandhurst, at which I had the privilege of being
a pupil in later life, there was a
kaleidoscope of ushers: fat and thin, grey-haired
and red-haired, ignorant and learned, clean
and dirty, gentlemanlike and very much
otherwise. We had half a hundred of them
in turn; some four or five were types
of the varieties of all the rest; and, after
fretting their little hour upon our school
stage — they did not stop much longer — they
seemed to run round behind, as in the minor
theatres, and appear again in another costume;
so like was one unto the other. They stood
the insolence of Mr. Sackem, our
headmaster, for spaces of a fortnight up to six
months, and then threw up in desperation
their forty pounds per annum and the
magnificent board and lodging.

Sackem was a scholastic blacksmith; he
was of a coaly complexion and enormous
bulk, had some little knowledge of
mathematics, and was famous for hammering out
scintillations of intelligence even from the
very densest masses. He was ludicrously
ignorant upon all subjects except those
which he professed to teach; yet it was his
custom to take every other master's class
occasionally, " to see if they kept their boys
up to the mark." Mouthing out Horace, so
that all the school might hear him, and
setting the classical assistant's teeth on edge
by false quantities; correcting the French
class while they conjugated " ater (être), to
be," while Monsieur Adolphe's shoulders
rose above his ears; and endeavouring,
in his exceedingly gruff and monotonous
tones, to point out the nice distinctions
between wurde, würde, and werde. "Now,
if he does it ein time more, so vill I give this
up for gute," said the poor German master.
But, it was of no use: it was impossible, under
such an examiner, that any class could acquit
themselves well; and, when he had caned
the whole of it for their own and his inaccuracies,
he was wont to abuse the ushers as
the causes of failure. Whenever a boy
of his broke down in endeavouring to pass
into Sandhurst, he found out in what subject
he had been weakest, and instantly fell
tooth and nail upon that particular professor.
One very gentlemanly person, cast by