These solemn pageantries were not played off so often as to spoil the general mirth of the community.  We had plenty of exercise and recreation after school hours; and, for myself, I must confess, that I was never happier, than in them.  The Upper and the Lower Grammar Schools were held in the same room; and an imaginary line only divided their bounds.  Their character was as different as that of the inhabitants on the two sides of the Pyrennees.  The Rev. James Boyer was the Upper Master; but the Rev. Matthew Field presided over that portion of the apartment, of which I had the good fortune to be a member.  We lived a life as careless as birds.  We talked and did just what we pleased, and nobody molested us.  We carried an accidence, or a grammar, for form; but, for any trouble it gave us, we might take two years in getting through the verbs deponent, and another two in forgetting all that we had learned about them.  There was now and then the formality of saying a lesson, but if you had not learned it, a brush across the shoulders (just enough to disturb a fly) was the sole remonstrance.  Field never used the rod; and in truth he wielded the cane with no great good will—­holding it “like a dancer.”  It looked in his hands rather like an emblem than an instrument of authority; and an emblem, too, he was ashamed of.  He was a good easy man, that did not care to ruffle his own peace, nor perhaps set any great consideration upon the value of juvenile time.  He came among us, now and then, but often staid away whole days from us; and when he came, it made no difference to us—­he had his private room to retire to, the short time he staid, to be out of the sound of our noise.  Our mirth and uproar went on.  We had classics of our own, without being beholden to “insolent Greece or haughty Rome,” that passed current among us—­Peter Wilkins—­the Adventures of the Hon. Capt.  Robert Boyle—­the Fortunate Blue Coat Boy—­and the like.  Or we cultivated a turn for mechanic or scientific operations; making little sun-dials of paper; or weaving those ingenious parentheses, called cat-cradles; or making dry peas to dance upon the end of a tin pipe; or studying the art military over that laudable game “French and English,” and a hundred other such devices to pass away the time—­mixing the useful with the agreeable—­as would have made the souls of Rousseau and John Locke chuckle to have seen us.

Matthew Field belonged to that class of modest divines who affect to mix in equal proportion the gentleman, the scholar, and the Christian; but, I know not how, the first ingredient is generally found to be the predominating dose in the composition.  He was engaged in gay parties, or with his courtly bow at some episcopal levee, when he should have been attending upon us.  He had for many years the classical charge of a hundred children, during the four or five first years of their education; and his very highest form seldom proceeded further than two