stead, with a dull, blank
dejection which those only who have gone through the same thing in their
boyhood will understand. To others, whose school life has been one
unchequered course of excitement and success, it will be
incomprehensible enough--and so much the better for them.

He sat listening to the grim sphinx clock on the black marble
chimneypiece, as it remorselessly ticked away his last few moments of
home-life, and he ingeniously set himself to crown his sorrow by
reviving recollections of happier days.

In one of the corners of the overmantel there was still a sprig of
withered laurel left forgotten, and his eye fell on it now with grim
satisfaction. He made his thoughts travel back to that delightful
afternoon on Christmas Eve, when they had all come home riotous through
the brilliant streets, laden with purchases from the Baker Street
Bazaar, and then had decorated the rooms with such free and careless
gaiety.

And the Christmas dinner too! He had sat just where he was sitting now,
with, ah, such a difference in every other respect--the time had not
come then when the thought of "only so many more weeks and days left"
had begun to intrude its grisly shape, like the skull at an ancient
feast.

And yet he could distinctly recollect now, and with bitter remorse, that
he had not enjoyed himself then as much as he ought to have done; he
even remembered an impious opinion of his that the proceedings were
"slow." Slow! with plenty to eat, and three (four, if he had only known
it) more weeks of holiday before him; with Boxing Day and the brisk
exhilarating drive to the Crystal Palace immediately following, with all
the rest of a season of licence and varied joys to come, which he could
hardly trust himself to look back upon now! He must have been mad to
think such a thing.

Overhead his sister Barbara was playing softly one of the airs from "The
Pirates" (it was Frederic's appeal to the Major-General's daughters),
and the music, freed from the serio-comic situation which it
illustrates, had a tenderness and pathos of its own which went to Dick's
heart and intensified his melancholy.

He had gone (in secret, for Mr. Bultitude disapproved of such
dissipations) to hear the Opera in the holidays, and now the piano
conjured the whole scene up for him again--there would be no more
theatre-going for him for a very long time!

By this time Mr. Bultitude began to feel the silence becoming once more
oppressive, and