she withdrew, weeping, to the female apartments, where, surrounded by her
maids, the decree of fate was reported, but not verbatim, after the manner
of the gods and goddesses. The maids and the washerwoman, however, scolded
one another very much after their manner, in a council held at midnight,
about my clothes; the result of the whole was that "they must be found and
packed;" and found and packed at last they were; and the next morning, as
decreed, early as Aurora streaked the east, to school I went, very little
thinking of her rosy-tipped fingers.



CHAPTER III.

My life at school was like that of any other school-boy. I shall not
record, even if I could remember, how often I was flogged when I did not
deserve it, or how often I escaped when I did. Five years of my life passed
away, of which I have nothing to relate but that I learned to whip a top,
and to play at ball and marbles, each in their season; that I acquired in
due course the usual quantity of Greek and Latin; and perpetrated in my
time, I presume, the usual quantity of mischief. But in the fourth year of
my schoolboy life, an opportunity for unusual mischief occurred. An
accident happened, which, however trifling in itself, can never be effaced
from my memory. Every particular connected with it, is indeed as fresh in
my recollection as it was the day after it happened. It was a circumstance
which awakened long dormant associations, and combined them with all the
feelings and principles of party spirit, which had first been inculcated by
my father at home, and which had been exercised so well and so continually
by my companions at school, as to have become the governing power of my
mind.