Meanwhile Billy-man was separated from both father and mother, and sailed home under the care of a black servant.  His ship called at St. Helena, and there the black servant took the little boy on a long walk over rocks and hills until they came to a garden.  In the garden a man was walking.  “That is he,” said the black man, “that is Bonaparte.  He eats three sheep every day, and all the little children he can lay hands on.”  Ugh!  We think that the little boy did not want to stay there long.

William reached home safely and was very happy with kind aunts and grandmother until he went to school.  And school he did not like at all.  Long afterwards in one of his books he wrote, “It was governed by a horrible little tyrant, who made our young lives so miserable, that I remember kneeling by my little bed of a night and saying, ‘Pray God, I may dream of my mother.’"*

Roundabout Papers.

But he left this school and when he was about eleven went to Charterhouse.  Here Thackeray was not much happier.  He was a pretty, gentle boy, and not particularly clever, either at games or at lessons.  The boys were rough and even brutal to each other, and Thackeray had to take his share of the blows, and got a broken nose which disfigured his good-looking face ever after.  And when he left school he took away with him a painful remembrance of all he had had to suffer.  But by degrees the suffering faded out of his memory and he looked upon his old school with kindly eyes, and called it no longer Slaughterhouse, but Grey Friars, in his books.

Before Thackeray went to Charterhouse his mother and stepfather had come home to England and made a home for the little boy where he spent happy holidays.  Thackeray was not very diligent, but in his last term at school he writes to his mother, “I really think I am becoming terribly industrious, though I can’t get Dr. Russell (the headmaster) to think so. . . .  There are but three hundred and seventy in the school.  I wish there were only three hundred and sixty-nine.”

Soon he had his wish, and leaving Charterhouse he went to Trinity College, Cambridge.  He liked Cambridge better than Charterhouse, but did not learn much more.  In little more than a year he left because he felt that he was wasting his time, and went abroad to finish his education.  After spending a happy year in Germany he came home to study at the bar, but soon finding he had no taste for law, he gave that up.

Thackeray was now of age and had come into a little fortuned of about 500 pounds a year, left to him by his father.  So he decided to try his hand at literature, and bought a paper called the National Standard, and became editor of it.  He could not, however, make his paper pay, and in that and other ways he had soon lost all his money.

It was now necessary that he should do something to earn a living, and he determined to be an artist, and went to Paris to study.  But although he was fond of drawing, and was able afterwards to illustrate some of his own books, he never became a real artist.