not happen to a tall, dark-faced boy, who cheated you in a swop of
jackknives. You innocently think that he must be a very bad boy, and
fancy--aided by a suggestion of the old nurse at home on the same
point--that he will one day come to the gallows.

There is a platform on one side of the schoolroom, where the teacher
sits at a little red table; and they have a tradition among the boys,
that a pin properly bent was one day put into the chair of the English
master, and that he did not wear his hand in the armlet of his waistcoat
for two whole days thereafter. Yet his air of dignity seems proper
enough in a man of such erudition, and such grasp of imagination, as he
must possess. For he can quote poetry,--some of the big scholars have
heard him do it; he can parse the whole of "Paradise Lost," and he can
cipher in Long Division, and the Rule of Three, as if it was all Simple
Addition; and then, such a hand as he writes, and such a superb capital
B! It is hard to understand how he does it.

Sometimes lifting the lid of your desk, where you pretend to be very
busy with your papers, you steal the reading of some brief passage of
"Lazy Lawrence," or of the "Hungarian Brothers," and muse about it for
hours afterward to the great detriment of your ciphering; or, deeply
lost in the story of the "Scottish Chiefs," you fall to comparing such
villains as Menteith with the stout boys who tease you; and you only
wish they could come within reach of the fierce Kirkpatrick's claymore.

But you are frighted out of this stolen reading by a circumstance that
stirs your young blood very strangely. The master is looking very sourly
on a certain morning, and has caught sight of the little weak-eyed boy
over beyond you, reading "Roderick Random." He sends out for a long
birch rod, and having trimmed off the leaves carefully,--with a glance