I suppose I must have been choking whilst uttering this confession.

"My dear boy," says the governor, "why didn't you go and breakfast at
the hotel?"

"He must be starved," says my mother.

I had confessed; I had been a prodigal; I had been taken back to my
parents' arms again. It was not a very great crime as yet, or a very
long career of prodigality; but don't we know that a boy who takes a pin
which is not his own, will take a thousand pounds when occasion serves,
bring his parents' gray heads with sorrow to the grave, and carry his
own to the gallows? Witness the career of Dick Idle, upon whom our
friend Mr. Sala has been discoursing. Dick only began by playing
pitch-and-toss on a tombstone: playing fair, for what we know: and
even for that sin he was promptly caned by the beadle. The bamboo
was ineffectual to cane that reprobate's bad courses out of him. From
pitch-and-toss he proceeded to manslaughter if necessary: to highway
robbery; to Tyburn and the rope there. Ah! heaven be thanked, my
parents' heads are still above the grass, and mine still out of the
noose.

As I look up from my desk, I see Tunbridge Wells Common and the rocks,
the strange familiar place which I remember forty years ago. Boys
saunter over the green with stumps and cricket-bats. Other boys gallop
by on the riding-master's hacks. I protest it is Cramp, Riding master,
as it used to be in the reign of George IV., and that Centaur Cramp must
be at least a hundred years old. Yonder comes a footman with a bundle
of novels from the library. Are they as good as OUR novels? Oh! how