the case in England, it has been
occupied by the same family for more than a hundred years, the family
never owning stick or stone of it, but paying regular rent, as if here
to-day and gone to-morrow, like the tenants of a city flat. The
grandfather of the present occupants brought his bride here and here
raised a numerous family. Of that family no representatives now live
save two grand-daughters, the shrill and strident spinsters who made us
so often forego our more impressive title to call ourselves after the
flourishing institution made immortal by the deathless Squeers.

It is confidently asserted in England, and by those who really think
they know whereof they speak, that although such torture-houses as
Dotheboys Hall certainly did exist, even so lately as Dickens wrote, the
publication of "Nicholas Nickleby," by turning attention upon the abuse,
effectually swept it out of English civilization. We "smile bitterly,"
as romance people do, whenever we hear this assertion. For were we not
ourselves inmates of Dothegirls Hall not very long ago, and do we not
positively know, without perhaps or peradventure, that it lives and
thrives and tortures yet, at the very instant of this writing?

Miss Sally kept a boarding-school and Miss Betsy took lodgers in the
wide chambers of St. John's. We were among the lodgers, and our
dining-room overlooked the gorse-golden meadows and the Avon, one
side-window, however, commanding the court-yard of the house. Our way
out of doors from our rooms led past the "dormitory" of the school and
down-stairs through the "refectory." Thus we had ample opportunity for
observation and to embitter our souls with knowledge of the interior
life of English Dothegirls Halls.

The "school" occupied four rooms,--dining-room, school-room, and two
bedrooms, the boys' dormitory and the girls'. The interior of the boys'
room we never saw, but the girls' we have surreptitiously stolen into,
and a more wretched, dingy, comfortless place it would be difficult to
imagine. All the girls--and there were ten or twelve of them--slept in
this limited space; they made their toilets, with one single towel for
the whole school, at the groaning pump beneath our window, and they
looked miserable and forlorn wherever we saw them, whether waiting upon
us as servants at our table or staring up anxiously from the court below
waiting the shaking of our table-cloth and the possible crusts that
might fall therefrom.

The s