You however come very little under his control; you enter upon the proud
life, in the small boy's department, under the dominion of the English
master. He is a different personage from Dr. Bidlow: he is a dapper
little man, who twinkles his eye in a peculiar fashion, and who has a
way of marching about the schoolroom with his hands crossed behind him,
giving a playful flirt to his coat-tails. He wears a pen tucked behind
his ear; his hair is carefully set up at the sides and upon the top, to
conceal (as you think later in life) his diminutive height; and he steps
very springily around behind the benches, glancing now and then at the
books,--cautioning one scholar about his dog's-ears, and startling
another from a doze by a very loud and odious snap of his forefinger
upon the boy's head.

At other times he sticks a hand in the armlet of his waistcoat; he
brandishes in the other a thickish bit of smooth cherry-wood, sometimes
dressing his hair withal; and again giving his head a slight scratch
behind the ear, while he takes occasion at the same time for an oblique
glance at a fat boy in the corner, who is reaching down from his seat
after a little paper pellet that has just been discharged at him from
some unknown quarter. The master steals very cautiously and quickly to
the rear of the stooping boy, dreadfully exposed by his unfortunate
position, and inflicts a stinging blow. A weak-eyed little scholar on
the next bench ventures a modest titter, at which the assistant makes a
significant motion with his ruler,--on the seat, as it were, of an
imaginary pair of pantaloons,--which renders the weak-eyed boy on a
sudden very insensible to the recent joke.

You meantime profess to be very much engrossed with your grammar--turned
upside-down; you think it must have hurt, and are only sorry that it did