monument of my perseverance, independence, and good sense,
redounding greatly to my honour. This was at about the period when
Olympia Squires became involved in the anniversary. Olympia was
most beautiful (of course), and I loved her to that degree, that I
used to be obliged to get out of my little bed in the night,
expressly to exclaim to Solitude, ‘O, Olympia Squires!’ Visions of
Olympia, clothed entirely in sage-green, from which I infer a
defectively educated taste on the part of her respected parents,
who were necessarily unacquainted with the South Kensington Museum,
still arise before me. Truth is sacred, and the visions are
crowned by a shining white beaver bonnet, impossibly suggestive of
a little feminine postboy. My memory presents a birthday when
Olympia and I were taken by an unfeeling relative – some cruel
uncle, or the like – to a slow torture called an Orrery. The
terrible instrument was set up at the local Theatre, and I had
expressed a profane wish in the morning that it was a Play: for
which a serious aunt had probed my conscience deep, and my pocket
deeper, by reclaiming a bestowed half-crown. It was a venerable
and a shabby Orrery, at least one thousand stars and twenty-five
comets behind the age. Nevertheless, it was awful. When the lowspirited
gentleman with a wand said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen’
(meaning particularly Olympia and me), ‘the lights are about to be
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put out, but there is not the slightest cause for alarm,’ it was
very alarming. Then the planets and stars began. Sometimes they
wouldn’t come on, sometimes they wouldn’t go off, sometimes they
had holes in them, and mostly they didn’t seem to be good
likenesses. All this time the gentleman with the wand was going on
in the dark (tapping away at the heavenly bodies between whiles,
like a wearisome woodpecker), about a sphere revolving on its own
axis eight hundred and ninety-seven thousand millions of times – or
miles – in two hundred and sixty-three thousand five hundred and
twenty-four millions of something elses, until I thought if this
was a birthday it were better never to have been born. Olympia,
also, became much depressed, and we both slumbered and woke cross,
and still the gentleman was going on in the dark – whether up in
the stars, or down on the stage, it would have been hard to make
out, if it had been worth trying – cyphering away about planes of
orbits, to such an infamous extent that Olympia, stung to madness,
actually kicked me. A pretty birthday spectacle, when the lights
were turned up again, and all the schools in the town (including
the National, who had come in for nothing, and serve them right,
for they were always throwing stones) were discovered with
exhausted countenances, screwing their knuckles into their eyes, or
clutching their heads of hair. A pretty birthday speech when Dr.
Sleek of the City-Free bobbed up his powdered head in the stagebox,
and said that before this assembly dispersed he really must
beg to express his entire approval of a lecture as improving, as
informing, as devoid of anything that could call a blush into the
cheek of youth, as any it had ever been his lot to hear delivered.
A pretty birthday altogether, when Astronomy couldn’t leave poor
Small Olympia Squires and me alone, but must put an end to our
loves! For, we never got over it; the threadbare Orrery outwore
our mutual tenderness; the man with the wand was too much for the
boy with the bow.
When shall I disconnect the combined smells of oranges, brown
paper, and straw, from those other birthdays at school, when the
coming hamper casts its shadow before, and when a week of social
harmony – shall I add of admiring and affectionate popularity – led
up to that Institution? What noble sentiments were expressed to me
in the days before the hamper, what vows of friendship were sworn
to me, what exceedingly old knives were given me, what generous
avowals of having been in the wrong emanated from else obstinate
spirits once enrolled among my enemies! The birthday of the potted