ost of those who reside under my roof are acquainted with, and I
trust execrate, the miserable cause of my doing so.

"If there is one virtue which I have striven to implant more than any
other in your breasts," he continued, "it is the cultivation of a modest
and becoming reserve in your intercourse with those of the opposite sex.

"With the majority I have, I hope, been successful, and it is as painful
for me to tell as for you to hear, that there exists in your midst a
youthful reprobate, trained in all the arts of ensnaring the vagrant
fancies of innocent but giddy girlhood.

"See him as he cowers there before your gaze, in all the bared
hideousness of his moral depravity" (the Doctor on occasions like these
never spared his best epithets, and Paul soon began to feel himself a
very villain); "a libertine, young in years, but old in--in everything
else, who has not scrupled to indite an amatory note, so appalling in
its familiarity, and so outrageous in the warmth of its sentiments, that
I cannot bring myself to shock your ears with its contents.

"You do well to shun him as a moral leper; but how shall I tell you
that, not satisfied with pressing his effusions upon the shrinking
object of his precocious affections, the impious wretch has availed
himself of the shelter of a church to cloak his insidious advances, and
even force a response to them from a heedless and imprudent girl!

"If," continued the Doctor, now allowing his powerful voice to boom to
its full compass--"if I can succeed in bringing this coward, this
unmanly dallier in a sentiment which the healthy mind of boyhood rejects
as premature, to a sense of his detestable conduct; if I can score the
lesson upon his flesh so that some faint notion of its force and purport
may be conveyed to what has been supplied to him as a heart, then I
shall not have lifted this hand in vain!

"He shall see whether he will be allowed to trail the fair name of the
school for propriety and correctness of deportment in the dust of a
pew-floor, and spurn my reputation as a preceptor like a church hassock
beneath his feet!

"I shall say no more; I will not prolong these strictures, deserved
though they be, beyond their proper limits.... I shall now proceed to
act. Richard Bultitude, remain there till I return to mete out to you
with no sparing hand the punishment you have so richly merited."

With these awful words the Doctor left the room, leaving Paul in a
state of ab