it miraculously happened to be all coppers, unrelieved by a single sparkle of silver or gold.  On which, in a red rage (and he often was in the like) he flung the whole bowlful into the long-room fire, from the ashes whereof for days after the small boys gladly collected hot half-pence.  We must recollect that the canny Scot was a mean over-reaching man, so perhaps he was well paid out.  Soon after the wedding, the bridegroom held high festival, and gave a grand dinner to all the masters.  Our big boys were equal to the occasion, and as the hired waiters from the Falcon brought out the viands (all was a delusive peace as they went in) our harpies flew upon the spoil, and each meat, fish and fowl was cleared off the great dishes held between the helpless hands of the astonished servitors!  It was really too bad, but if a man is so manifestly unpopular no doubt he deserves it.  Rugbeians would not have so served Arnold.  Nearly all my schoolmates are dead, and I cannot call on Charles Roe or Frank Ellis to corroborate my small anecdotes, but I could till lately on Sir William Knighton and one or two more.  In a crowd of five hundred scholars (Russell’s average number, afterwards much diminished, until Godalming brought up the tale), there must be many still extant and of eminence whom I would name if I did but know them.  Certainly, yes, Trevelyan was my next neighbour in the “emeriti,” and there was Hebert, the one distinguished in the State, the other in the Church; also Cole, and his noble chief of Enniskillen, whom I have visited at Florence Court; and Walford, our great genealogist, with many more; among the more recent dead, let me mention my good friend Archibald Mathison, lately an Indian Judge, and Robert Curzon, and Arthur Helps, the historian of Mexico.  Thackeray I knew then but very slightly, as he was a lower schoolboy, and John Leech not at all, because he was a day boy, seeing that the upper school was made to keep foolishly aloof from all such; however, in after years I made good acquaintance with both of those true geniuses, and had Leech down to Albury, and to illustrate my tales, whilst I have several times compared judgments with Thackeray as to Doctor Birch and his young friends and other scholia.

For the matter of my practical education at Charterhouse, I like others went through the usual course, though without much distinction.  I never gained a prize, albeit I tried for some, by certain tame didactic poems on the Tower, Carthage, and Jerusalem, and as I couldn’t as a stammerer speak in school, high places were out of my reach.  Like others, however, I learned by heart all Horace’s odes and epodes, the Ajax and the Antigone of Sophocles, and other like efforts of memory, almost useless in after life, except for capping quotations, and thereby being thought a pedant by the display of schoolboy erudition.  How often have I wished that the years wasted over Latin verses and Greek plays had been utilised among French and