When it was certain that poor Jacob would appear no more--and when his
motive for resigning, and his words at taking leave were recollected--and
when it became evident that his balls, and his tops, and his marbles, and
his knives, had always been better and _more reasonable_ than Dutton's, the
tide of popularity ran high in his favour. _Poor Jacob_ was loudly
regretted; and as long as schoolboys could continue to think about the same
thing, we continued conjecturing why it was that Jacob would not tell us
his father's name. We made many attempts to trace him, and to discover his
secret; but all our inquiries proved ineffectual: we could hear no more of
Jacob, and our curiosity died away.

Mowbray, who was two or three years my senior, left school soon afterwards.
We did not meet at the university; he went to Oxford, and I to Cambridge.



CHAPTER IV.

When the mind is full of any one subject, that subject seems to recur with
extraordinary frequency--it appears to pursue or to meet us at every turn:
in every conversation that we hear, in every book we open, in every
newspaper we take up, the reigning idea recurs; and then we are surprised,
and exclaim at these wonderful coincidences. Probably such happen every
day, but pass unobserved when the mind is not intent upon similar ideas, or
excited by any strong analogous feeling.

When the learned Sir Thomas Browne was writing his Essay on the Gardens of
Cyrus, his imagination was so possessed by the idea of a quincunx, that he
is said to have seen a quincunx in every object in nature. In the same
manner, after a Jew had once made an impression on my imagination, a Jew