te Marcus' Cave exercises, and as few lads of my
inches wrestled better than I, the master, though a tall and tolerably
robust fellow, found the feat considerably more difficult than he could
have supposed. We swayed from side to side of the school-room, now
backwards, now forwards, and for a full minute it seemed to be rather a
moot point on which side the victory was to incline. At length, however,
I was tripped over a form; and as the master had to deal with me, not as
master usually deals with pupil, but as one combatant deals with
another, whom he has to beat into submission, I was mauled in a way that
filled me with aches and bruises for a full month thereafter. I greatly
fear that, had I met the fellow on a lonely road five years subsequent
to our encounter, when I had become strong enough to raise breast-high
the "great lifting stone of the Dropping Cave," he would have caught as
sound a thrashing as he ever gave to little boy or girl in his life; but
all I could do at this time was to take down my cap from off the pin,
when the affair had ended, and march straight out of school. And thus
terminated my school education. Before night I had avenged myself, in a
copy of satiric verses, entitled "The Pedagogue," which--as they had
some little cleverness in them, regarded as the work of a boy, and as
the known eccentricities of their subject gave me large
scope--occasioned a good deal of merriment in the place; and of the
verses a fair copy, written out by Finlay, was transmitted through the
Post-Office to the pedagogue himself. But the only notice he ever took
of them was incidentally, in a short speech made to the copyist a few
days after. "I _see_, Sir," he said,--"I _see_ you still associate with
that fellow Miller; perhaps he will make you a poet!" "I had thought,
Sir," said Finlay very quietly, in reply, "that poets were born--not
made."

As a specimen of the rhyme of this period, and as in some degree a
set-off against my drubbing, which remains till this day an unsettled
score, I submit my pasquinade to the reader:--

THE PEDAGOGUE.

With solemn mien and pious air,
S--k--r attends each call of grace;
Loud eloquence bedecks his prayer,
And formal sanctity his face.

All good; but turn the other side,
And see the smirking beau displayed;
The pompous strut, exalted air,
And all that marks the fop, is there.

In character we seldom see
Traits so