the hurly-burly and be alone with my reflections and my fancies.  That magnetism of humanity which has been the agony of mature years, of this I had not a trace when I was a boy.  Of those fragile loves to which most men look back with tenderness and passion, emotions to be explained only as Montaigne explained them, parceque c’etait lui, parceque c’etait moi, I knew nothing.  I, to whom friendship has since been like sunlight and like sleep, left school unbrightened and unrefreshed by commerce with a single friend.

If I had been clever, I should doubtless have attracted the jealousy of my fellows, but I was spared this by the mediocrity of my success in the classes.  One little fact I may mention, because it exemplifies the advance in observation which has been made in forty years.  I was extremely nearsighted, and in consequence was placed at a gross disadvantage, by being unable to see the slate or the black-board on which our tasks were explained.  It seems almost incredible, when one reflects upon it, but during the whole of my school life, this fact was never commented upon or taken into account by a single person, until the Polish lady who taught us the elements of German and French drew someone’s attention to it in my sixteenth year.  I was not quick, but I passed for being denser than I was because of the myopic haze that enveloped me.  But this is not an autobiography, and with the cold and shrouded details of my uninteresting school life I will not fatigue the reader.

I was not content, however, to be the cipher that I found myself, and when I had been at school for about a year, I ‘broke out’, greatly, I think, to my own surprise, in a popular act.  We had a young usher whom we disliked.  I suppose, poor half-starved phthisic lad, that he was the most miserable of us all.  He was, I think, unfitted for the task which had been forced upon him; he was fretful, unsympathetic, agitated.  The school-house, an old rambling place, possessed a long cellar-like room that opened from our general corridor and was lighted by deep windows, carefully barred, which looked into an inner garden.  This vault was devoted to us and to our play-boxes:  by a tacit law, no master entered it.  One evening, just at dusk, a great number of us were here when the bell for night-school rang, and many of us dawdled at the summons.  Mr. B., tactless in his anger, bustled in among us, scolding in a shrill voice, and proceeded to drive us forth.  I was the latest to emerge, and as he turned away to see if any other truant might not be hiding, I determined upon action.  With a quick movement, I drew the door behind me and bolted it, just in time to hear the imprisoned usher scream with vexation.  We boys all trooped upstairs and it is characteristic of my isolation that I had not one ‘chum’ to whom I could confide my feat.