with small beer. It certainly gave me, it was so small, a very
desponding idea of the extent to which littleness might be carried; and
it would have been too vapid for the toleration of any palate, had it
not been so sour. As I sat regardless before this repast, in abstracted
grief, I underwent the first of the thousand practical jokes that were
hereafter to familiarise me with manual jocularity. My right-hand
neighbour, jerking me by the elbow, exclaimed, "Hollo, you sir, there's
Jenkins, on the other side of you, cribbing your bread." I turned
towards the supposed culprit, and discovered that my informant had
fibbed, but the informed against told me to look round and see where my
cheese was. I did; it was between the mandibles of my kind neighbour on
my right, and when I turned again to the left for an explanation, the
rogue there had stripped my round of bread of all the crust. I cared
not then for this double robbery, but having put the liquid before me,
incautiously to my lips, sorrowful as I was, I cared for that. Joe
Brandon never served me so. I drank that evening as little as I ate.

CHAPTER NINE.

I PROVE TO BE, NOT ONE IN A THOUSAND, BUT ONE IN A QUARTER OF THAT
NUMBER, TO WHOM NO QUARTER WAS SHOWN--IN SPITE OF MY ENTREATIES I AM
EVIL ENTREATED, AND AM NOT ONLY PLACED ON THE LOWEST FORM, BUT MADE
EXCESSIVELY UNCOMFORTABLE ON MY SEAT OF HONOUR.

Heroes, statesmen, philosophers, must bend to circumstances, and so must
little boys at boarding-school. I went to bed with the rest, and, like
the rest, had my bed-fellow. Miserable and weary was that night to my
infant heart. When I found I could do so unobserved, I buried my face
in the pillow, and wept with a perfect passion of wretchedness.

I had a hard, a cruel life at that school. When I lived with my nurse,
the boys in the street used to beat me because I was too much of the
gentleman, and now the young gentlemen thrashed me for not coming up to
their standard of gentility. I saw a tyrant in every urchin that was
stronger than myself, and a derider in him that was weaker. The next
morning after my arrival, a fellow a little bigger than myself, came up,
and standing before me, gave me very deliberately as hard a slap in the
face as his strength would permit. Half crying with the pain, and yet
not wishing to be thought quarrelsome, I asked, with good-natured
humility, whether that was done in jest or in earnest. The little
insolent replied