starvation. It is only a
question of time, just as with the burning of college libraries. These
all burn up sooner or later, provided they are not housed in brick or
stone and iron. I don't mean that you will see in the registry of deaths
that this or that particular tutor died of well-marked, uncomplicated
starvation. They _may_, even, in extreme cases, be carried off by a
thin, watery kind of apoplexy, which sounds very well in the returns,
but means little to those who know that it is only debility settling on
the head. Generally, however, they fade and waste away under various
pretexts,--calling it dyspepsia, consumption, and so on, to put a decent
appearance upon the case and keep up the credit of the family and the
institution where they have passed through the successive stages of
inanition.

In some cases it takes a great many years to kill a tutor by the
process in question. You see, they do get food and clothes and fuel, in
appreciable quantities, such as they are. You will even notice rows of
books in their rooms, and a picture or two,--things that look as if
they had surplus money; but these superfluities are the _water of
crystallization_ to scholars, and you can never get them away till
the poor fellows effloresce into dust. Do not be deceived. The tutor
breakfasts on coffee made of beans, edulcerated with milk watered to the
verge of transparency; his mutton is tough and elastic, up to the
moment when it becomes tired out and tasteless; his coal is a sullen,
sulphurous anthracite, which rusts into ashes, rather than burns, in
the shallow grate; his flimsy broadcloth is too thin for winter and too
thick for summer. The greedy lungs of fifty hot-blooded boys suck the
oxygen from the air he breathes in his recitation-room. In short, he
undergoes a process of gentle and gradual starvation.

--The mother of little Iris was not called Electra, like hers of the old
story, neither was her grandfather Oceanus. Her blood-name, which she
gave away with her heart to the Latin tutor, was a plain old English
one, and her water-name was Hannah, beautiful as recalling the mother of
Samuel, and admirable as reading equally well from the initial letter
forwards and from the terminal letter backwards. The poor lady, seated
with her companion at the chess-board of matrimony, had but just pushed
forward her one little white pawn upon an empty square, when the Black
Knight, that cares nothing for castles or kings or queens,