the next
conclave of personages who may be assembled to discuss the destinies of
nations, there may be as much of the milk of human kindness and right
feelings among them as there was between me and the labouring sawyer,
Joe Brandon, the one being at the top, and the other at the bottom of
the wall.

The next Sunday, Brandon was again on the wall with a prodigious
plum-cake. A regular cut-and-come-again affair: it fell to the ground
with a heaviness of sound that beat the falling of Corporal Trim's hat
all to ribbons. To be sure, the corporal's fell as if there had been a
quantity of "clay kneaded in the crown of it," whilst mine was kneaded
with excellent dough. The Sunday after, there was the same appearance,
varied with gingerbread, and then--for years, I neither saw, nor heard
of him. Poor Joseph was threatened with the constable, and was put to
no more expense for cakes for his foster-son.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN.

PRAY REMEMBER THE FIFTH OF NOVEMBER--RUMOURS OF WARS--PRECEDED BY
SCHOLASTIC ELOCUTION, AND SUCCEEDED BY A COLD DINNER, DARKNESS, AND
DETERMINATION.

I shall now draw the dolorous recital of what I have termed my epoch of
despondency to a close. The fifth of November was approaching; I had
been at school nearly two years, and had learned little but the hard
lesson "to bear," and that I had well studied. I had, as yet, made no
friends. Boys are very tyrannical and very generous by fits. They will
bully and oppress the outcast of a school, because it is the fashion to
bully and oppress him--but they will equally magnify their hero, and are
sensitively alive to admiration of feats of daring and wild exploit.
With them, bravery is the first virtue, generosity the second. They
crouch under the strong for protection, and they court the lavish from
self-interest. In all this they differ from men in nothing but that
they act more undisguisedly. Well, the fifth of November was fast
approaching, on which I was to commence the enthusiastic epoch of my
schoolboy existence. I was now twelve years of age. Almost insensible
to bodily pain by frequent magisterial and social thrashings, tall,
strong of my age, reckless, and fearless. The scene of my first exploit
was to be amidst the excitement of a "barring out," but of such a
"barring out" that the memory of it remains in the vicinity in which it
took place to this day.

I have before said that the school contained never less than two hundred
and fi