I was a hypochondriac lad; and the sight of a boy in fetters, upon the day of my first putting on the blue clothes, was not exactly fitted to assuage the natural terrors of initiation.  I was of tender years, barely turned of seven; and had only read of such things in books, or seen them but in dreams.  I was told he had run away.  This was the punishment for the first offence.—­As a novice I was soon after taken to see the dungeons.  These were little, square, Bedlam cells, where a boy could just lie at his length upon straw and a blanket—­a mattress, I think, was afterwards substituted—­with a peep of light, let in askance, from a prison-orifice at top, barely enough to read by.  Here the poor boy was locked in by himself all day, without sight of any but the porter who brought him his bread and water—­who might not speak to him;—­or of the beadle, who came twice a week to call him out to receive his periodical chastisement, which was almost welcome, because it separated him for a brief interval from solitude:—­and here he was shut up by himself of nights, out of the reach of any sound, to suffer whatever horrors the weak nerves, and superstition incident to his time of life, might subject him to.[2] This was the penalty for the second offence.—­Wouldst thou like, reader, to see what became of him in the next degree?

The culprit, who had been a third time an offender, and whose expulsion was at this time deemed irreversible, was brought forth, as at some solemn auto da fe, arrayed in uncouth and most appalling attire—­all trace of his late “watchet weeds” carefully effaced, he was exposed in a jacket, resembling those which London lamplighters formerly delighted in, with a cap of the same.  The effect of this divestiture was such as the ingenious devisers of it could have anticipated.  With his pale and frighted features, it was as if some of those disfigurements in Dante had seized upon him.  In this disguisement he was brought into the hall (L.’s favourite state-room), where awaited him the whole number of his school-fellows, whose joint lessons and sports he was thenceforth to share no more; the awful presence of the steward, to be seen for the last time; of the executioner beadle, clad in his state robe for the occasion; and of two faces more, of direr import, because never but in these extremities visible.  These were governors; two of whom, by choice, or charter, were always accustomed to officiate at these Ultima Supplicia; not to mitigate (so at least we understood it), but to enforce the uttermost stripe.  Old Bamber Gascoigne, and Peter Aubert, I remember, were colleagues on one occasion, when the beadle turning rather pale, a glass of brandy was ordered to prepare him for the mysteries.  The scourging was, after the old Roman fashion, long and stately.  The lictor accompanied the criminal quite round the hall.  We were generally too faint with attending to the previous disgusting circumstances, to make accurate report with our eyes of the degree of corporal suffering inflicted.  Report, of course, gave out the back knotty and livid.  After scourging, he was made over, in his San Benito, to his friends, if he had any (but commonly such poor runagates were friendless), or to his parish officer, who, to enhance the effect of the scene, had his station allotted to him on the outside of the hall gate.