well as to sheep and kangaroos.

BREAKING UP.

The schools have by this time all "broken up," if that is still the term
which expresses the beginning of their vacation. "Breaking up" is no
longer the festival that it was in the good old coaching days--nothing is
what it was in the good old coaching days. Boys can no longer pass a
whole happy day driving through the country and firing peas at the
wayfaring man. They have to travel by railway, and other voyagers may
well pray that their flight be not on breaking-up day. The untrammelled
spirits of boyhood are very much what they have always been. Boys fill
the carriages to overflowing. They sing, they shout, they devour
extraordinary quantities of refreshment, they buy whole libraries of
railway novels, and, generally speaking, behave as if the earth and the
fulness of it were their own. This is trying to the mature traveller,
who has plenty of luggage on his mind, and who wishes to sleep or to read
the newspaper. Boys have an extraordinary knack of losing their own
luggage, and of appearing at home, like the companions of Ulysses,
"bearing with them only empty hands." This is usually their first
exploit in the holidays. Their arrival causes great excitement among
their little sisters, and in the breasts of their fathers wakens a
presentiment of woe. When a little boy comes home his first idea is to
indulge in harmless swagger. When Tom Tulliver went to school, he took
some percussion caps with him that the other lads might suppose him to be
familiar with the use of guns. The schoolboy has other devices for
keeping up the manly character in the family circle. The younger ones
gather round him while he narrates the adventures of himself, and Smith
minor, and Walker (of Briggs's house), in a truly epic spirit. He has
made unheard-of expeditions up the river, has chaffed a farmer almost
into apoplexy, has come in fifth in the house paper-chase, has put the
French master to open shame, and has got his twenty-two colours. These
are the things that make a boy respected by his younger brothers, and
admired by his still younger sisters. They of course have a good deal to
tell him. The setter puppies must be inspected. A match is being got up
with the village eleven, who are boastful and confident in the possession
of a bowling curate. To this the family hero rejoins that "he will crump
the parson," a threat not so awful as it sounds. There is a wasps'