arolina after the
Confederate War. Through the personal good influence of honest "Old
Joe," and his middle-aged housekeeper, Mrs. Jones, our whole
well-ordered company of perhaps a hundred boys lived and learned, worked
and played purely, and happily together: so great a social benefactor
may a good school chieftain be.

I have little to regret in my Brook Green recollections; the annual fair
was memorable with Richardson's show and Gingel's conjuring, and the
walks for mild cricketing at Shepherd's Bush, and the occasional Sundays
at home; and how pleasant to a schoolboy was the generous visitor who
tipped him, a good action never forgotten; and the garden with its
flowering tulip-tree, and the syringas and rose-trees jewelled with the
much-prized emerald May-bugs; for the whole garden was liberally thrown
open to us beyond the gravelled playground; all being now given over to
monks and nuns. Then I recollect how a rarely-dark annular eclipse of
the sun convulsed the whole school, bringing smoked glass to a high
premium; and there was a notable boy's library of amusing travels and
stories, all eagerly devoured; and old Phulax the house-dog, and good
Mr. Whitmore an usher, who gave a certain small boy a diamond
prayer-book, greatly prized then, though long since lost, and suitably
inscribed for him "_Parvum parva decent_;" and the speech days, wherein
the same small boy always signalised himself, to the general
astonishment, for he was usually a stammerer, owing much to the early
worries of Brentford; all these are agreeable reminiscences.

My next school at eleven was Charterhouse, or as my schoolfellow
Thackeray was wont to style it, Slaughterhouse, no doubt from the cruel
tyranny of another educational D.D., the Rev. Dr. Russell. For this man
and the school he so despotically drilled into passive servility and
pedantic scholarship, I have less than no reverence, for he worked so
upon an over-sensitive nature to force a boy beyond his powers, as to
fix for many years the infirmity of stammering, which was my affliction
until past middle life. As for tuition, it must all have grown of itself
by dint of private hard grinding with dictionaries and grammars, for the
exercises, themes, and other lessons were notoriously difficult, and
those before me would be inextricable puzzles now; however, we had to do
them, and we did them, unhelped by any teacher but our own industry. As
for the masters in school, two more ignorant