ected to find him a person of mild manners, who shaved
his head, wore a tall hat of dyed sheep's wool, and did a large business
in spices with people who visited him on camels in a front-yard
surrounded by sheds, and having a fountain that played in the middle.

Having read several books of travels, I was corroborated in my view when
I learned that Mr. Barker lived at the east, and still further, when on
going around point Judith on the steamboat with my father, I became very
sick at the stomach, as all the travellers had done in their first
chapter.

I need not say that the reality of Mr. Barker was a very terrible
awakening, which contained no lineament of my purple dream, save the
bastinado. Without distinction of age or season the youths who, as per
circular, enjoyed the softening influence of his refined Christian home,
rose to the sound of the gong at five A.M., which may have been very
nice in a home for the early Christians, but was reported among the boys
to have entirely stopped the growth of Little Briggs. This was a child,
whose mother had married again, and whose step-father had felt his duty
to his future too keenly to deprive him of the benign influences of
Barker at any time in the last six years. After rising, we had ten
minutes to wash our faces and hands,--a period by the experience of
mankind demonstrably insufficient, where the soap is of that kind very
properly denominated cast-steel (though purists have a different
spelling), and you have to break an inch of ice to get into the
available region of your water-pitcher. Chunks, who has since made a
large fortune on war-contracts, kept himself in peanuts and four-cent
pies for an entire winter session, by selling an invention of his own,
which consisted of soap, dissolved in water on the stove during the
day-time, put in bottles hooked from the lamp-room by means of a false
key, to be carried to bed and kept warm by boys, whose pocket-money and
desire for a prompt detergent in the morning were adequate to the
disbursement of half a dime a package. I myself took several violent
colds from having the glass next my skin during severe nights; but that
was nothing so bad as the case of Little Briggs, who from lack of the
half-dime, often came down to prayers with a stripe of yesterday's
pencil black on one side of his nose, and a shaving of soap, which, in
the frenzy of despair he had gouged out of his stony cake, on the other.
The state of mind consisten