Garden, and might be seen driving any Sunday in Hyde Park with a groom
with squared arms and armorial buttons by his side. Many of the seniors
were in love, and showed each other in confidence poems addressed to, or
letters and locks of hair received from, young ladies--but Pen, a modest
and timid youth, rather envied these than imitated them as yet. He had
not got beyond the theory as yet--the practice of life was all to come.
And by the way, ye tender mothers and sober fathers of Christian
families, a prodigious thing that theory of life is as orally learned at
a great public school. Why, if you could hear those boys of fourteen who
blush before mothers and sneak off in silence in the presence of their
daughters, talking among each other--it would be the women's turn to
blush then. Before he was twelve years old and if while his mother
fancied him an angel of candour, little Pen had heard talk enough to make
him quite awfully wise upon certain points--and so, Madam, has your
pretty little rosy-cheeked son, who is coming home from school for the
ensuing Christmas holidays. I don't say that the boy is lost, or that the
innocence has left him which he had from 'Heaven, which is our home,' but
that the shades of the prison-house are closing very fast over him, and
that we are helping as much as possible to corrupt him.

Well--Pen had just made his public appearance in a coat with a tail, or
cauda virilis, and was looking most anxiously in his little study-glass
to see if his whiskers were growing, like those of more fortunate youths
his companions; and, instead of the treble voice with which he used to
speak and sing (for his singing voice was a very sweet one, and he used
when little to be made to perform 'Home, sweet Home,' 'My pretty Page,'
and a French song or two which his mother had taught him, and other
ballads for the delectation of the senior boys), had suddenly plunged
into a deep bass diversified by a squeak, which when he was called upon
to construe in school set the master and scholars laughing he was about