always polite, because (as we believed), if the Chief offended him,
he would instantly address the Chief in French, and for ever
confound him before the boys with his inability to understand or
reply.
There was besides, a serving man, whose name was Phil. Our
retrospective glance presents Phil as a shipwrecked carpenter, cast
away upon the desert island of a school, and carrying into practice
an ingenious inkling of many trades. He mended whatever was
broken, and made whatever was wanted. He was general glazier,
among other things, and mended all the broken windows – at the
prime cost (as was darkly rumoured among us) of ninepence, for
every square charged three-and-six to parents. We had a high
opinion of his mechanical genius, and generally held that the Chief
‘knew something bad of him,’ and on pain of divulgence enforced
Phil to be his bondsman. We particularly remember that Phil had a
sovereign contempt for learning: which engenders in us a respect
for his sagacity, as it implies his accurate observation of the
relative positions of the Chief and the ushers. He was an
impenetrable man, who waited at table between whiles, and
throughout ‘the half’ kept the boxes in severe custody. He was
morose, even to the Chief, and never smiled, except at breaking-up,
when, in acknowledgment of the toast, ‘Success to Phil! Hooray!’
he would slowly carve a grin out of his wooden face, where it would
remain until we were all gone. Nevertheless, one time when we had
the scarlet fever in the school, Phil nursed all the sick boys of
his own accord, and was like a mother to them.
There was another school not far off, and of course Our School
could have nothing to say to that school. It is mostly the way
with schools, whether of boys or men. Well! the railway has
swallowed up ours, and the locomotives now run smoothly over its
ashes.
So fades and languishes, grows dim and dies,
All that this world is proud of,
– and is not proud of, too. It had little reason to be proud of
Our School, and has done much better since in that way, and will do
far better yet.
Page 128
Dickens, Charles – Reprinted Pieces
OUR VESTRY
WE have the glorious privilege of being always in hot water if we
like. We are a shareholder in a Great Parochial British Joint
Stock Bank of Balderdash. We have a Vestry in our borough, and can
vote for a vestryman – might even BE a vestryman, mayhap, if we
were inspired by a lofty and noble ambition. Which we are not.
Our Vestry is a deliberative assembly of the utmost dignity and
importance. Like the Senate of ancient Rome, its awful gravity
overpowers (or ought to overpower) barbarian visitors. It sits in
the Capitol (we mean in the capital building erected for it),
chiefly on Saturdays, and shakes the earth to its centre with the
echoes of its thundering eloquence, in a Sunday paper.
To get into this Vestry in the eminent capacity of Vestryman,
gigantic efforts are made, and Herculean exertions used. It is
made manifest to the dullest capacity at every election, that if we
reject Snozzle we are done for, and that if we fail to bring in
Blunderbooze at the top of the poll, we are unworthy of the dearest
rights of Britons. Flaming placards are rife on all the dead walls
in the borough, public-houses hang out banners, hackney-cabs burst
into full-grown flowers of type, and everybody is, or should be, in
a paroxysm of anxiety.
At these momentous crises of the national fate, we are much
assisted in our deliberations by two eminent volunteers; one of
whom subscribes himself A Fellow Parishioner, the other, A Rate-
Payer. Who they are, or what they are, or where they are, nobody
knows; but, whatever one asserts, the other contradicts. They are
both voluminous writers, indicting more epistles than Lord
Chesterfield in a single week; and the greater part of their
feelings are too big for utterance in anything less than capital
letters. They require the additional aid of whole rows of notes of
admiration, like balloons, to point their generous indignation; and