In some cases it takes a great many years to kill a tutor by the process in question.  You see, they do get food and clothes and fuel, in appreciable quantities, such as they are.  You will even notice rows of books in their rooms, and a picture or two,—­things that look as if they had surplus money; but these superfluities are the water of crystallization to scholars, and you can never get them away till the poor fellows effloresce into dust.  Do not be deceived.  The tutor breakfasts on coffee made of beans, edulcerated with milk watered to the verge of transparency; his mutton is tough and elastic, up to the moment when it becomes tired out and tasteless; his coal is a sullen, sulphurous anthracite, which rusts into ashes, rather than burns, in the shallow grate; his flimsy broadcloth is too thin for winter and too thick for summer.  The greedy lungs of fifty hot-blooded boys suck the oxygen from the air he breathes in his recitation-room.  In short, he undergoes a process of gentle and gradual starvation.

—­The mother of little Iris was not called Electra, like hers of the old story, neither was her grandfather Oceanus.  Her blood-name, which she gave away with her heart to the Latin tutor, was a plain old English one, and her water-name was Hannah, beautiful as recalling the mother of Samuel, and admirable as reading equally well from the initial letter forwards and from the terminal letter backwards.  The poor lady, seated with her companion at the chess-board of matrimony, had but just pushed forward her one little white pawn upon an empty square, when the Black Knight, that cares nothing for castles or kings or queens, swooped down upon her and swept her from the larger board of life.

The old Latin tutor put a modest blue stone at the head of his late companion, with her name and age and Eheu! upon it,—­a smaller one at her feet, with initials; and left her by herself, to be rained and snowed on,—­which is a hard thing to do for those whom we have cherished tenderly.

About the time that the lichens, falling on the stone, like drops of water, had spread into fair, round rosettes, the tutor had starved into a slight cough.  Then he began to draw the buckle of his black pantaloons a little tighter, and took in another reef in his never-ample waistcoat.  His temples got a little hollow, and the contrasts of color in his cheeks more vivid than of old.  After a while his walks fatigued him, and he was tired and breathed hard after going up a flight or two of stairs.  Then came on other marks of inward trouble and general waste, which he spoke of to his physician as peculiar, and doubtless owing to accidental causes; to all which the doctor listened with deference, as if it had not been the old story that one in five or six of mankind in temperate climates tells, or has told for him, as if it were something new.  As the doctor went out, he said to himself,—­“On the rail at last.  Accommodation train.  A good many stops, but will