who unaccountably appeared one day at a special desk of his own,
erected close to that of the Chief, with whom he held familiar
converse. He lived in the parlour, and went out for his walks, and
never took the least notice of us – even of us, the first boy –
unless to give us a deprecatory kick, or grimly to take our hat off
and throw it away, when he encountered us out of doors, which
unpleasant ceremony he always performed as he passed – not even
condescending to stop for the purpose. Some of us believed that
the classical attainments of this phenomenon were terrific, but
that his penmanship and arithmetic were defective, and he had come
there to mend them; others, that he was going to set up a school,
and had paid the Chief ‘twenty-five pound down,’ for leave to see
Our School at work. The gloomier spirits even said that he was
going to buy us; against which contingency, conspiracies were set
on foot for a general defection and running away. However, he
never did that. After staying for a quarter, during which period,
though closely observed, he was never seen to do anything but make
pens out of quills, write small hand in a secret portfolio, and
punch the point of the sharpest blade in his knife into his desk
all over it, he too disappeared, and his place knew him no more.
There was another boy, a fair, meek boy, with a delicate complexion
and rich curling hair, who, we found out, or thought we found out
(we have no idea now, and probably had none then, on what grounds,
but it was confidentially revealed from mouth to mouth), was the
son of a Viscount who had deserted his lovely mother. It was
understood that if he had his rights, he would be worth twenty
thousand a year. And that if his mother ever met his father, she
would shoot him with a silver pistol, which she carried, always
loaded to the muzzle, for that purpose. He was a very suggestive
topic. So was a young Mulatto, who was always believed (though
very amiable) to have a dagger about him somewhere. But, we think
they were both outshone, upon the whole, by another boy who claimed
to have been born on the twenty-ninth of February, and to have only
one birthday in five years. We suspect this to have been a fiction
– but he lived upon it all the time he was at Our School.
The principal currency of Our School was slate pencil. It had some
inexplicable value, that was never ascertained, never reduced to a
standard. To have a great hoard of it was somehow to be rich. We
used to bestow it in charity, and confer it as a precious boon upon
our chosen friends. When the holidays were coming, contributions
were solicited for certain boys whose relatives were in India, and
who were appealed for under the generic name of ‘Holiday-stoppers,’
– appropriate marks of remembrance that should enliven and cheer
them in their homeless state. Personally, we always contributed
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these tokens of sympathy in the form of slate pencil, and always
felt that it would be a comfort and a treasure to them.
Our School was remarkable for white mice. Red-polls, linnets, and
even canaries, were kept in desks, drawers, hat-boxes, and other
strange refuges for birds; but white mice were the favourite stock.
The boys trained the mice, much better than the masters trained the
boys. We recall one white mouse, who lived in the cover of a Latin
dictionary, who ran up ladders, drew Roman chariots, shouldered
muskets, turned wheels, and even made a very creditable appearance
on the stage as the Dog of Montargis. He might have achieved
greater things, but for having the misfortune to mistake his way in
a triumphal procession to the Capitol, when he fell into a deep
inkstand, and was dyed black and drowned. The mice were the
occasion of some most ingenious engineering, in the construction of
their houses and instruments of performance. The famous one
belonged to a company of proprietors, some of whom have since made