midst of my shame, I could hardly help admiring the clever way
in which he had remembered all the details, and twisted them into a
comic ballad, which he had composed overnight, and which he now
recited with a mock heroic air and voice, which made every point tell,
and kept the boys in convulsions of laughter. Not a smile crossed his
long, lantern-jawed face; but Mr. Thomas Johnson made no effort this
time to hide a severe fit of his peculiar spasms in his spotted
handkerchief.

Sometimes--at night--in the very bottom of my own heart, when the
darkness seemed thick with horrors, and when I could not make up my
mind whether to keep my ears strained to catch the first sound of
anything dreadful, or to pull the blankets over my head and run the
risk of missing it,--in such moments, I say, I have had a passing
private doubt whether I had inherited my share of the family instinct
of courage at a crisis.

It was therefore a relief to me to feel that in this moment of
despair, when I was only waiting till the boys, being no longer
amused by Weston, should turn to amuse themselves with me, my first
and strongest feeling was a sense of relief that Rupert was not at
school, and that I could bear the fruits of my own folly on my own
shoulders. To be spared his hectoring and lecturing, his hurt pride,
his reproaches, and rage with me, and a probable fight with Weston, in
which he must have been seriously hurt and I should have been
blamed--this was some comfort.

I had got my lesson well by heart. Fifty thousand preachers in fifty
thousand pulpits could never have taught me so effectually as Weston's
ballad, and the laughter of his audience, that there is less
difference than one would like to believe between the vanity of
bragging of one's self and the vanity of bragging of one's relations.
Also that it is not dignified or discreet to take new acquaintance
into your entire confidence and that even if one is blessed with
friends of such quick sympathy that they really enjoy hearing about
people they have never seen, it is well not to abuse the privilege,
and now and then to allow them an "innings" at describing _their_
remarkable parents, brothers, sisters, and remoter relatives.

I realized all this fully as I stood, with burning cheeks and downcast
eyes, at the very elbow of my tormentor. But I am glad to know that I
would not have run away even if I could. My resolution grew
stubborner with every peal of laughter to bear w