They made no pretence, however, to be considered godly; they looked upon me as an intruder; and after a while the younger, and ruder, of them openly let me know that they believed I had been put into their room to ‘spy upon’ them; it had been a plot, they knew, between their father and mine:  and he darkly warned me that I should suffer if ‘anything got out’.  I had, however, no wish to trouble them, nor any faint interest in their affairs.  I soon discovered that they were absorbed in a silly kind of amorous correspondence with the girls of a neighbouring academy, but ‘what were all such toys to me?’

These young fellows, who ought long before to have left the school, did nothing overtly unkind to me, but they condemned me to silence.  They ceased to address me except with an occasional command.  By reason of my youth, I was in bed and asleep before my companions arrived upstairs, and in the morning I was always routed up and packed about my business while they still were drowsing.  But the fact that I had been cut off from my coevals by night, cut me off from them also by day—­so that I was nothing to them, neither a boarder nor a day-scholar, neither flesh, fish nor fowl.  The loneliness of my life was extreme, and that I always went home on Saturday afternoon and returned on Monday morning still further checked my companionships at school.  For a long time, round the outskirts of that busy throng of opening lives, I ‘wandered lonely as a cloud’, and sometimes I was more unhappy than I had ever been before.  No one, however, bullied me, and though I was dimly and indefinably witness to acts of uncleanness and cruelty, I was the victim of no such acts and the recipient of no dangerous confidences.  I suppose that my queer reputation for sanctity, half dreadful, half ridiculous, surrounded me with a non-conducting atmosphere.

We are the victims of hallowed proverbs, and one of the most classic of these tells us that ‘the child is father of the man’.  But in my case I cannot think that this was true.  In mature years I have always been gregarious, a lover of my kind, dependent upon the company of friends for the very pulse of moral life.  To be marooned, to be shut up in a solitary cell, to inhabit a lighthouse, or to camp alone in a forest, these have always seemed to me afflictions too heavy to be borne, even in imagination.  A state in which conversation exists not, is for me an air too empty of oxygen for my lungs to breathe it.

Yet when I look back upon my days at boarding-school, I see myself unattracted by any of the human beings around me.  My grown-up years are made luminous to me in memory by the ardent faces of my friends, but I can scarce recall so much as the names of more than two or three of my schoolfellows.  There is not one of them whose mind or whose character made any lasting impression upon me.  In later life, I have been impatient of solitude, and afraid of it; at school, I asked for no more than to slip out of