of sausages. My own profession and principles
are those of a philanthropist, but—nay,
therefore—if I had the power, and caught any
man or boy who knew of the forlorn and
piteous state of that poor brute, ill-using and
tormenting it, I would hang him higher
than Haman.

Shall I ever forget that agony of despair,
that utter desolation, which I myself
experienced during my first few days at a boarding-
school—the first time I was left behind?
When the shadow of my mother, as she bent
over me for the last time, had been withdrawn;
when the noise of the wheels which
conveyed her home (home!) had died away;
when the accents of my schoolmaster—as
different from those in which he spoke two
minutes back as a grating nutmeg from the
fall of wine through a silver strainer—smote
harshly upon my ears with—

"You had better join your new friends in
the playground, sir!"

How all the memories of my happy childhood
rushed through my little brain in that
one moment; how dear seemed every kindness
of which I had recked so lightly, how gentle
every hand whose pressure I had not cared
to understand! How the smoothing of the
pillow, and the soothing of the pain, came
back to reproach me with ingratitude, and
the thousand pleasures of my young life to
pierce me with regret! My new friends in
the playground, I was pretty certain, were
not concocting plans to insure my happiness,
and those companions of my solitude did not
belie my suspicions. How mockingly familiar
they were in their inquiries after papa and
mamma, how cynically interested about my
little sister, how hypocritically sentimental
upon the rheumatism which I told them my
old nurse Mathison was suffering from in the
left knee; and, when I had communicated
everything, with what a hearty good-will the
biggest boy knocked me down, and the rest
kicked me back when I attempted to get up
again! This incident, so charming to the
advocates of school discipline, and so
illustrative of our educational moral training,
made but little impression upon me, except
physically, in bumps and bruises. I have
thought much of this since, however, in my
position of philanthropist, and whenever a
similar case occurs I would hang—not the
poor brutal boys, but their learned and,
perhaps, reverend preceptors, under whose
rule such abominable instincts are let loose
on helpless and unoffending objects. As I
say, however, this was, in my case, rather
a relief, for having been hurt a good deal
about the head, and bleeding a little from
the mouth, I was carried upstairs and put
in dormitory at once—a long bare room with
five white beds in it beside my own, clean as
snow, and almost as comfortless. I just
beheId it for an instant, and the uninteresting
vision passed away. But, O! for that
indifferent chamber over the saddle-room at
home, where the old coachman slept, and my
beloved playmate the knife-boy; and for one
look of my unsympathised-with old nurse
Mathison; and one tuck-up of my bed-clothes
by her affectionate hands! Towards nearer
and dearer than these my full heart did not
dare to flutter, or, I verily believe, it would
have burst upon its way; tears from the
depths of some divine despair at last
relieved me, and I revelled in what was, by
contrast to the smothered passion, a luxury
of grief. Robinson Crusoe—I made these
parallels out of my stock of infant reading,
but without deriving any consolation
therefrom—Robinson Crusoe, when first cast
ashore upon his island, enjoyed high spirits
compared with mine, for he had not then, as
I had, discovered that he shared it with
savages. Captain Bligh, cut adrift with his
ship's biscuit and a bottle of rum, was, in his
jolly-boat and amongst his companions, to be
relatively envied. Philip Quarll—I was
calling to mind the superior advantages of
that recluse over myself when up came the
school to bed. They ascended the carpetless
stairs to their respective resting-places with
about the same disturbance that the builders
of Babel must have gone about erecting their
last finished storey with; and yet they were in
their stockings only, for I heard a tremendous
noise of kicking off shoes at the bottom flight,
and the slippers, which each had been there
furnished with, were merely used as weapons
of offence and retaliation. Smacks like the
report of pocket-pistols gave warning of the
approach of my five companions, who were
driven in by a superior force from the room
opposite. They dipped the ends of their
towels in jugs, however, and with these
ingenious weapons at once repelled the enemy;
moreover, a Cavé, or sentinel, was set at the
door with a bolster, to guard against surprise,
while the other four disrobed themselves for
action. There was war declared, as it seemed,
between our dormitory and the next, which
was at once both a bold and a perfidious
dormitory, hard to beat, and whom no treaty
could bind; and we had an awful time of it.
Often, in the dead of night, when sleep was
knitting up the ravelled sleeve of care, has my
pillow been abstracted, and myself half
suffocated by repeated blows; often has
water been poured upon me five hours before
the usual time for performing the morning
ablution; often have my limbs been deprived
of blanket, sheet, and counterpane, at one
fell swoop. The next room never slept. Our
outposts in the Crimea was a joke to the life
I led in those times. This first night,
however, our candle having been immediately
dowsed, or extinguished, by the invading
force, my presence was, for some time,
undiscovered. I lay with beating heart, motionless
through fear and sorrow, until the moment
should arrive when mutual animosity was to
be buried—I expected it—in a common
object of persecution. Not till the usher