APRIL.--FOOLING.

After this, as you may fancy, I left this disgusting establishment, and
lived for some time along with pa and mamma at home. My education was
finished, at least mamma and I agreed that it was; and from boyhood
until hobbadyhoyhood (which I take to be about the sixteenth year of
the life of a young man, and may be likened to the month of April
when spring begins to bloom)--from fourteen until seventeen, I say, I
remained at home, doing nothing--for which I have ever since had a
great taste--the idol of my mamma, who took part in all my quarrels with
father, and used regularly to rob the weekly expenses in order to find
me in pocket-money. Poor soul! many and many is the guinea I have had
from her in that way; and so she enabled me to cut a very pretty figure.

Papa was for having me at this time articled to a merchant, or put
to some profession; but mamma and I agreed that I was born to be a
gentleman and not a tradesman, and the army was the only place for me.
Everybody was a soldier in those times, for the French war had just
begun, and the whole country was swarming with militia regiments. "We'll
get him a commission in a marching regiment," said my father. "As we
have no money to purchase him up, he'll FIGHT his way, I make no doubt."
And papa looked at me with a kind of air of contempt, as much as to say
he doubted whether I should be very eager for such a dangerous way of
bettering myself.

I wish you could have heard mamma's screech when he talked so coolly of
my going out to fight! "What! send him abroad, across the horrid, horrid
sea--to be wrecked and perhaps drowned, and only to land for the