ry
does not dare to come to the scratch.

Dr Skinner was telling Theobald all about his pamphlet, and I doubt
whether this gentleman was much more comfortable than Ernest himself. He
was bored, for in his heart he hated Liberalism, though he was ashamed to
say so, and, as I have said, professed to be on the Whig side. He did
not want to be reconciled to the Church of Rome; he wanted to make all
Roman Catholics turn Protestants, and could never understand why they
would not do so; but the Doctor talked in such a truly liberal spirit,
and shut him up so sharply when he tried to edge in a word or two, that
he had to let him have it all his own way, and this was not what he was
accustomed to. He was wondering how he could bring it to an end, when a
diversion was created by the discovery that Ernest had begun to
cry--doubtless through an intense but inarticulate sense of a boredom
greater than he could bear. He was evidently in a highly nervous state,
and a good deal upset by the excitement of the morning, Mrs Skinner
therefore, who came in with Christina at this juncture, proposed that he
should spend the afternoon with Mrs Jay, the matron, and not be
introduced to his young companions until the following morning. His
father and mother now bade him an affectionate farewell, and the lad was
handed over to Mrs Jay.

O schoolmasters--if any of you read this book--bear in mind when any
particularly timid drivelling urchin is brought by his papa into your
study, and you treat him with the contempt which he deserves, and
afterwards make his life a burden to him for years--bear in mind that it
is exactly in the disguise of such a boy as this that your future
chronicler will appear. Never see a wretched little heavy-eyed mite
sitting on the edge of a chair against your study wall without saying to
yourselves, "perhaps this boy is he who, if I am not careful, will one
day tell the world what manner of man I was." If even two or three
schoolmasters learn this lesson and remember it, the preceding chapters
will not have been written in vain.

CHAPTER XXIX

Soon after his father and mother had left him Ernest dropped asleep over
a book which Mrs Jay had given him, and he did not awake till dusk. Then
he sat down on a stool in front of the fire, which showed pleasantly in
the late January twilight, and began to muse. He felt weak, feeble, ill
at ease and unable to see his way out of the innumerable troubles that
we