a dunghill, to sit next to the sons of peers,--or much worse still,
next to the sons of big tradesmen who made their ten thousand a
year? The indignities I endured are not to be described. As I look
back it seems to me that all hands were turned against me,--those
of masters as well as boys. I was allowed to join in no plays. Nor
did I learn anything,--for I was taught nothing. The only expense,
except that of books, to which a house-boarder was then subject,
was the fee to a tutor, amounting, I think, to ten guineas. My
tutor took me without the fee; but when I heard him declare the fact
in the pupil-room before the boys, I hardly felt grateful for the
charity. I was never a coward, and cared for a thrashing as little
as any boy, but one cannot make a stand against the acerbities of
three hundred tyrants without a moral courage of which at that time
I possessed none. I know that I skulked, and was odious to the eyes
of those I admired and envied. At last I was driven to rebellion,
and there came a great fight,--at the end of which my opponent
had to be taken home for a while. If these words be ever printed,
I trust that some schoolfellow of those days may still be left alive
who will be able to say that, in claiming this solitary glory of
my school-days, I am not making a false boast.

I wish I could give some adequate picture of the gloom of that
farmhouse. My elder brother--Tom as I must call him in my narrative,
though the world, I think, knows him best as Adolphus--was at Oxford.
My father and I lived together, he having no means of living except
what came from the farm. My memory tells me that he was always
in debt to his landlord and to the tradesmen he employed. Of
self-indulgence no one could accuse him. Our table was poorer, I
think, than that of the bailiff who still hung on to our shattered
fortunes. The furniture was mean and scanty. There was a large