epelled love, and its whole principle seemed to be embodied
in the belief that a child should think despitefully of himself, and
should repress all natural ebullitions of fondness or of gaiety. I have
been trying hard to recall the surname of the boy to whom my heart
first flowed out in a real affection, but memory fails me. He was a
schoolfellow of mine, and I guess that he may have been of Scottish
parentage, because his Christian name was Gavin. I can give no reason,
at this time of day--nor ever in my maturer years have I been able to
find a reason--why I should have loved that small contemporary as I
did. I cannot say that he was conspicuously gifted in any way. He was
certainly no Steerforth to my Copperfield, being neither distinguished
for good looks, nor for brilliance at his schoolwork, nor for success in
games.

It was at this time that there was an ebb in the family fortunes, and
I was hastily taken away from a respectable private school in the High
Street, and sent, as I have explained, to a big vulgar establishment a
mile away, where a crowd of some three hundred lads attended, at a cost
to their parents of threepence a week per head. I did not stay
there long, but whilst I was kept there, by the strain on the family
exchequer, I was very unhappy. It was in the midst of a sore-hearted
loneliness that I encountered Gavin, who, to the best of my belief, was
the son of a bargee who worked on the Worcester and Birmingham Canal.
The impulse which took me towards him I have always regarded as one of
the strangest, as it was undoubtedly one of the strongest, I have known.
He and I were pretty much alike in age--somewhere between nine and ten
we must have been--and we seemed to slide together like two separate
rainspots which meet upon a window-pane in wet weather. We used to
wander about the stony playground, from which every blade of grass was
trampled, except in the remoter corners, and to walk with our arms
about each other's shoulders, and to exchange almost daily such trumpery
schoolboy treasures as we owned. I never had a child sweetheart, and I
never knew anybody with whom I exchanged a caress, or bartered a word of
real kindness, until I fell in with this fascinating young ragamuffin.
I never spoke about him to a soul, but he filled my thoughts night
and day, and I was never happy out of his society. I am guilty of no
exaggeration when I say that. The feeling I had towards him was, in its
own time, so ten