hen and there he had
nothing to fear; now, he had everything to fear;--the grim aunt--even
the quiet, kind, cold, austere uncle--the apprentices--the strange
servants--and, oh! more than all, those hardeyed, loud-laughing
tormentors, the boys of his own age! Naturally timid, severity made him
actually a coward; and when the nerves tremble, a lie sounds as surely
as, when I vibrate that wire, the bell at the end of it will ring.
Beware of the man who has been roughly treated as a child.

The day after the conference just narrated, Mr. Morton, who was subject
to erysipelas, had taken a little cooling medicine. He breakfasted,
therefore, later than usual--after the rest of the family; and at this
meal pour lui soulager he ordered the luxury of a muffin. Now it so
chanced that he had only finished half the muffin, and drunk one cup
of tea, when he was called into the shop by a customer of great
importance--a prosy old lady, who always gave her orders with remarkable
precision, and who valued herself on a character for affability, which
she maintained by never buying a penny riband without asking the shopman
how all his family were, and talking news about every other family in
the place. At the time Mr. Morton left the parlour, Sidney and Master
Tom were therein, seated on two stools, and casting up division sums
on their respective slates--a point of education to which Mr. Morton
attended with great care. As soon as his father's back was turned,
Master Tom's eyes wandered from the slate to the muffin, as it leered
at him from the slop-basin. Never did Pythian sibyl, seated above the
bubbling spring, utter more oracular eloquence to her priest, than
did that muffin--at least the parts of it yet extant--utter to the
fascinated senses of Master Tom. First he sighed; then he moved round
on his stool; then he got up; then he peered at the muffin from a
respectful distance; then he gradually approached, and walked round, and
round, and round it--his eyes getting bigger and bigger; then he peeped
through the glass-door into the shop, and saw his father busily engaged
with the old lady; then he began to calculate and philosophise, perhaps
his father had done breakfast; perhaps he would not come back at all; if
he came back, he would not miss one corner of the muffin; and if he
did miss it, why should Tom be supposed to have taken it? As he thus
communed with himself, he drew nearer into the fatal vortex, and at last
with a desperat