ut
wished to say in his ear, Did he think he could arrange to send home to
England a jar of preserved Ginger, cheap, for Mrs Perch's own eating, in
the course of her recovery from her next confinement?

CHAPTER 14. Paul grows more and more Old-fashioned, and goes Home for
the Holidays

When the Midsummer vacation approached, no indecent manifestations
of joy were exhibited by the leaden-eyed young gentlemen assembled at
Doctor Blimber's. Any such violent expression as 'breaking up,' would
have been quite inapplicable to that polite establishment. The young
gentlemen oozed away, semi-annually, to their own homes; but they never
broke up. They would have scorned the action.

Tozer, who was constantly galled and tormented by a starched white
cambric neckerchief, which he wore at the express desire of Mrs Tozer,
his parent, who, designing him for the Church, was of opinion that he
couldn't be in that forward state of preparation too soon--Tozer said,
indeed, that choosing between two evils, he thought he would rather stay
where he was, than go home. However inconsistent this declaration might
appear with that passage in Tozer's Essay on the subject, wherein he had
observed 'that the thoughts of home and all its recollections, awakened
in his mind the most pleasing emotions of anticipation and delight,'
and had also likened himself to a Roman General, flushed with a recent
victory over the Iceni, or laden with Carthaginian spoil, advancing
within a few hours' march of the Capitol, presupposed, for the purposes
of the simile, to be the dwelling-place of Mrs Tozer, still it was very
sincerely made. For it seemed that Tozer had a dreadful Uncle, who
not only volunteered examinations of him, in the holidays, on abstruse
points, but twisted innocent events and things, and wrenched them to the
same fell purpose. So that if this Uncle took him to the Play, or, on a
similar pretence of kindness, carried him to see a Giant, or a Dwarf,
or a Conjuror, or anything, Tozer knew he had read up some classical
allusion to the subject beforehand, and was thrown into a state of
mortal apprehension: not foreseeing where he might break out, or what
authority he might not quote against him.

As to Briggs, his father made no show of artifice about it. He never
would leave him alone. So numerous and severe were the mental trials of
that unfortunate youth in vacation time, that the friends of the family
(then resident near Bayswater, Lond