him--and I expected, in the usual
order of things, an assiduous flogging. But in this world we are the
martyrs of disappointment. The awful man folded up the paper very
melancholily, and thrust it into his waistcoat pocket, and thus saved me
the expense of some very excellent magnanimity, which I had determined
to display, had he proceeded to flagellation. It was my intention very
intrepidly to have told him, that if he punished me I also would run
away. On the veracity of a schoolboy, I was disappointed at not
receiving my three or four dozen.

I had now fairly commenced my enthusiastic epoch. I was somebody. I
still slept in the haunted room. I had struck the first blow in the
barring out--Saint Albans had openly commended me for my bravery--I
could no longer despise myself, and the natural consequence was that
others dared not. I formed friendships, evanescent certainly, but very
sweet and very sincere. Several of the young gentlemen promised to
prevail upon their parents to invite me to their homes during the
approaching holidays; but either their memories were weak, or their
fathers obdurate.

Well, the winter holidays came at last, and I was left sole inhabitant
of that vast and lonely school-room, with one fire for my solace, and
one tenpenny dip for my enlightenment. How awful and supernatural
seemed every passing sound that beat upon my anxious ears! Everything
round me seemed magnified--the massive shadows were as the wombs teeming
with unearthly phantoms--the whistle of the wintry blasts against the
windows, voiced the half-unseen beings that my fears acknowledged in the
deep darknesses of the vast chamber. And then that lonely orchestra,--
often did I think that I heard low music from the organ, as if touched
by ghostly fingers--how gladly I would have sunk down from my solitude
to the vulgarity of the servant's hall--but that was now carefully
interdicted. The consequences of all this seclusion to a highly
imaginative and totally unregulated mind, must have been much worse than
putting me to sleep in the haunted room, for in that I had my
counter-spell--and long use had almost endeared me to it and its
grotesque carvings--but this dismally large school-room, generally so
instinct with life, so superabounding in animation, was painfully
fearful, even from the contrast. Twenty times in the evening, when the
cold blast came creeping along the floor and wound round my ankles, did
I imagine it w