failed me, and I felt myself alone among six hundred
playmates.

O the cruelty of separating a poor lad from his early homestead! The
yearnings which I used to have towards it in those unfledged years!
How, in my dreams, would my native town (far in the west) come back,
with its church, and trees, and faces! How I would wake weeping, and
in the anguish of my heart exclaim upon sweet Calne in Wiltshire!

To this late hour of my life, I trace impressions left by the
recollection of those friendless holidays. The long warm days of
summer never return but they bring with them a gloom from the haunting
memory of those _whole-day-leaves_, when, by some strange arrangement,
we were turned out, for the live-long day, upon our own hands, whether
we had friends to go to, or none. I remember those bathing excursions
to the New River, which L. recalls with such relish, better, I think,
than he can--for he was a home-seeking lad, and did not much care for
such water-pastimes:--How merrily we would sally forth into the
fields; and strip under the first warmth of the sun; and wanton like
young dace in the streams; getting us appetites for noon, which those
of us that were penniless (our scanty morning crust long since
exhausted) had not the means of allaying--while the cattle, and the
birds, and the fishes, were at feed about us, and we had nothing to
satisfy our cravings--the very beauty of the day, and the exercise of
the pastime, and the sense of liberty, setting a keener edge upon
them!--How faint and languid, finally we would return, towards
nightfall, to our desired morsel, half-rejoicing, half-reluctant, that
the hours of our uneasy liberty had expired!

It was worse in the days of winter, to go prowling about the streets
objectless--shivering at cold windows of print-shops, to extract a
little amusement; or haply, as a last resort, in the hope of a little
novelty, to pay a fifty-times repeated visit (where our individual
faces should be as well known to the warden as those of his own
charges) to the Lions in the Tower--to whose levee, by courtesy
immemorial, we had a prescriptive title to admission.

L.'s governor (so we called the patron who presented us to the
foundation) lived in a manner under his paternal roof. Any complaint
which he had to make was sure of being attended to. This was
understood at Christ's, and was an effectual screen to him against the
severity of masters, or worse tyranny of the monitors. The oppre