it be summer now, if your blighted evergreens remain as their result and memorial.  And the man who was brought up in an unhappy home in childhood will never feel that that unhappy home has ceased to be a present reality, if he knows that its whole discipline fostered in him a spirit of distrust in his kind which is not yet entirely got over, and made him set himself to the work of life with a heart somewhat soured and prematurely old.  The past is a great reality.  We are here the living embodiment of all we have seen and felt through all our life,—­fashioned into our present form by millions of little touches, and by none with a more real result than the hours of sorrow we have known.

One great cause of the suffering of boyhood is the bullying of bigger boys at school.  I know nothing practically of the English system of fagging at public schools, but I am not prepared to join out and out in the cry against it.  I see many evils inherent in the system; but I see that various advantages may result from it, too.  To organize a recognized subordination of lesser boys to bigger ones must unquestionably tend to cut the ground from under the feet of the unrecognized, unauthorized, private bully.  But I know that at large schools, where there is no fagging, bullying on the part of youthful tyrants prevails to a great degree.  Human nature is beyond doubt fallen.  The systematic cruelty of a school-bully to a little boy is proof enough of that, and presents one of the very hatefullest phases of human character.  It is worthy of notice, that, as a general rule, the higher you ascend in the social scale among boys, the less of bullying there is to be found.  Something of the chivalrous and the magnanimous comes out in the case of the sons of gentlemen:  it is only among such that you will ever find a boy, not personally interested in the matter, standing up against the bully in the interest of right and justice.  I have watched a big boy thrashing a little one, in the presence of half a dozen other big boys, not one of whom interfered on behalf of the oppressed little fellow.  You may be sure I did not watch the transaction longer than was necessary to ascertain whether there was a grain of generosity in the hulking boors; and you may be sure, too, that that thrashing of the little boy was, to the big bully, one of the most unfortunate transactions in which he had engaged in his bestial and blackguard, though brief, life. I took care of that, you may rely on it.  And I favored the bully’s companions with my sentiments as to their conduct, with an energy of statement that made them sneak off, looking very like whipped spaniels.  My friendly reader, let us never fail to stop a bully, when we can.  And we very often can.  Among the writer’s possessions might be found by the curious inspector several black kid gloves, no longer fit for use, though apparently not very much worn.  Surveying these integuments minutely, you would find