to be fozier than the
foziest turnip, and unfit to bash a fly.

Far and wide, over hill, bank, and brae, are spread the flying School!
Squads of us, at sore sixes and sevens, are making for the frozen woods.
Alas! poor covert now in their naked leaflessness for the stricken deer!
Twos and threes in miserable plight floundering in drift-wreaths! And
here and there--woefullest sight of all--single boys distractedly
ettling at the sanctuaries of distant houses--with their heads all the
while insanely twisted back over their shoulders, and the glare of their
eyes fixed frightfully on the swift-footed Mad Dominie, till souse over
neck and ears, bubble and squeak, precipitated into traitorous pitfall,
and in a moment evanished from this upper world!

Disturbed crows fly away a short distance and alight silent,--the
magpies chatter pert even in alarm,--the lean kine, collected on the
lown sides of braes, wonder at the rippet--their horns moving, but not
their tails,--while the tempest-tamed bull--almost dull now as an
ox--gives a short sullen growl as he feebly paws the snow.

But who is he--the tall slender boy--slender, but sinewy--a wiry
chap--five feet eight on his stocking-soles--and on his stocking-soles
he stands--for the snow has sucked his shoes from his feet--that plants
himself like an oak sapling, rooted ankle-deep on a knoll, and there, a
juvenile Jupiter Stator, with voice and arm arrests the Flight, and
fiercely gesticulating vengeance on the insolent foe, recalls and
rallies the shattered School, that he may re-lead them to victory? The
phantom of a visionary dream! KIT NORTH HIMSELF--

"In life's morning march when his spirit was young."

And once on a day was that figure--ours! Then like a chamois-hunter of
the Alps! Now, alas! like--

"But be hush'd, my dark spirit--for wisdom condemns,
When the faint and the feeble deplore;
Be strong as a rock of the ocean that stems
A thousand wild waves on the shore.
Through the perils of chance and the scowl of disdain,
Let thy front be unalter'd, thy courage elate;
_Yea! even the name we have worshipp'd in vain_
Shall awake not a pang of remembrance again;
_To bear, is to conquer our fate!_"

Half a century is annihilated as if it had never been: it is as if young
Kit had become not old Kit--but were standing now as then front to
front, with but a rood of trampled snow between them, before the Mad
Dominie and Bob