punch the point of the sharpest blade in his knife into his desk
all over it, he too disappeared, and his place knew him no more.
There was another boy, a fair, meek boy, with a delicate complexion
and rich curling hair, who, we found out, or thought we found out
(we have no idea now, and probably had none then, on what grounds,
but it was confidentially revealed from mouth to mouth), was the
son of a Viscount who had deserted his lovely mother. It was
understood that if he had his rights, he would be worth twenty
thousand a year. And that if his mother ever met his father, she
would shoot him with a silver pistol, which she carried, always
loaded to the muzzle, for that purpose. He was a very suggestive
topic. So was a young Mulatto, who was always believed (though
very amiable) to have a dagger about him somewhere. But, we think
they were both outshone, upon the whole, by another boy who claimed
to have been born on the twenty-ninth of February, and to have only
one birthday in five years. We suspect this to have been a fiction
- but he lived upon it all the time he was at Our School.
The principal currency of Our School was slate pencil. It had some
inexplicable value, that was never ascertained, never reduced to a
standard. To have a great hoard of it was somehow to be rich. We
used to bestow it in charity, and confer it as a precious boon upon
our chosen friends. When the holidays were coming, contributions
were solicited for certain boys whose relatives were in India, and
who were appealed for under the generic name of 'Holiday-stoppers,'
- appropriate marks of remembrance that should enliven and cheer
them in their homeless state. Personally, we always contributed
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these tokens of sympathy in the form of slate pencil, and always
felt that it would be a comfort and a treasure to them.
Our School was remarkable for white mice. Red-polls, linnets, and
even canaries, were kept in desks, drawers, hat-boxes, and other
strange refuges for birds; but white mice were the favourite stock.
The boys trained the mice, much better than the masters trained the
boys. We recall one white mouse, who lived in the cover of a Latin
dictionary, who ran up ladders, drew Roman chariots, shouldered
muskets, turned wheels, and even made a very creditable appearance
on the stage as the Dog of Montargis. He might have achieved
greater things, but for having the misfortune to mistake his way in
a triumphal procession to the Capitol, when he fell into a deep
inkstand, and was dyed black and drowned. The mice were the
occasion of some most ingenious engineering, in the construction of
their houses and instruments of performance. The famous one
belonged to a company of proprietors, some of whom have since made
Railroads, Engines, and Telegraphs; the chairman has erected mills
and bridges in New Zealand.
The usher at Our School, who was considered to know everything as
opposed to the Chief, who was considered to know nothing, was a
bony, gentle-faced, clerical-looking young man in rusty black. It
was whispered that he was sweet upon one of Maxby's sisters (Maxby
lived close by, and was a day pupil), and further that he 'favoured
Maxby.' As we remember, he taught Italian to Maxby's sisters on
half-holidays. He once went to the play with them, and wore a
white waistcoat and a rose: which was considered among us
equivalent to a declaration. We were of opinion on that occasion,
that to the last moment he expected Maxby's father to ask him to
dinner at five o'clock, and therefore neglected his own dinner at
half-past one, and finally got none. We exaggerated in our
imaginations the extent to which he punished Maxby's father's cold
meat at supper; and we agreed to believe that he was elevated with
wine and water when he came home. But, we all liked him; for he
had a good knowledge of boys, and would have made it a much better
school if he had had more power. He was writing master,
mathematical master, English master, made out the bills, mended the
pens, and did all sorts of things. He divided the little boys with
the Latin master (they were smuggled through their rudimentary
books, at odd times when there was nothing else to do), and he
because he had gentlemanly manners. He was rather musical, and on
some remote quarter-day had bought an old trombone; but a bit of it
was lost, and it made the most extraordinary sounds when he
sometimes tried to play it of an evening. His holidays never began
(on account of the bills) until long after ours; but, in the summer
vacations he used to take pedestrian excursions with a knapsack;
and at Christmas time, he went to see his father at Chipping
Norton, who we all said (on no authority) was a dairy-fed porkbutcher.
Poor fellow! He was very low all day on Maxby's sister's
wedding-day, and afterwards was thought to favour Maxby more than
ever, though he had been expected to spite him. He has been dead
these twenty years. Poor fellow!
Our remembrance of Our School, presents the Latin master as a
colourless doubled-up near-sighted man with a crutch, who was
always cold, and always putting onions into his ears for deafness,
and always disclosing ends of flannel under all his garments, and
almost always applying a ball of pocket-handkerchief to some part
of his face with a screwing action round and round. He was a very
good scholar, and took great pains where he saw intelligence and a
desire to learn: otherwise, perhaps not. Our memory presents him
(unless teased into a passion) with as little energy as colour - as
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having been worried and tormented into monotonous feebleness - as
having had the best part of his life ground out of him in a Mill of
boys. We remember with terror how he fell asleep one sultry
afternoon with the little smuggled class before him, and awoke not
when the footstep of the Chief fell heavy on the floor; how the
Chief aroused him, in the midst of a dread silence, and said, 'Mr.
Blinkins, are you ill, sir?' how he blushingly replied, 'Sir,
rather so;' how the Chief retorted with severity, 'Mr. Blinkins,
this is no place to be ill in' (which was very, very true), and
walked back solemn as the ghost in Hamlet, until, catching a
wandering eye, he called that boy for inattention, and happily
expressed his feelings towards the Latin master through the medium
of a substitute.
There was a fat little dancing-master who used to come in a gig,
and taught the more advanced among us hornpipes (as an
accomplishment in great social demand in after life); and there was
a brisk little French master who used to come in the sunniest
weather, with a handleless umbrella, and to whom the Chief was
always polite, because (as we believed), if the Chief offended him,
he would instantly address the Chief in French, a
nd for ever
confound him before the boys with his inability to understand or
reply.
There was besides, a serving man, whose name was Phil. Our
retrospective glance presents Phil as a shipwrecked carpenter, cast
away upon the desert island of a school, and carrying into practice
an ingenious inkling of many trades. He mended whatever was
broken, and made whatever was wanted. He was general glazier,
among other things, and mended all the broken windows - at the
prime cost (as was darkly rumoured among us) of ninepence, for
every square charged three-and-six to parents. We had a high
opinion of his mechanical genius, and generally held that the Chief
'knew something bad of him,' and on pain of divulgence enforced
Phil to be his bondsman. We particularly remember that Phil had a
sovereign contempt for learning: which engenders in us a respect
for his sagacity, as it implies his accurate observation of the
relative positions of the Chief and the ushers. He was an
impenetrable man, who waited at table between whiles, and
throughout 'the half' kept the boxes in severe custody. He was
morose, even to the Chief, and never smiled, except at breaking-up,
when, in acknowledgment of the toast, 'Success to Phil! Hooray!'
he would slowly carve a grin out of his wooden face, where it would
remain until we were all gone. Nevertheless, one time when we had
the scarlet fever in the school, Phil nursed all the sick boys of
his own accord, and was like a mother to them.
There was another school not far off, and of course Our School
could have nothing to say to that school. It is mostly the way
with schools, whether of boys or men. Well! the railway has
swallowed up ours, and the locomotives now run smoothly over its
ashes.
So fades and languishes, grows dim and dies,
All that this world is proud of,
- and is not proud of, too. It had little reason to be proud of
Our School, and has done much better since in that way, and will do
far better yet.
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OUR VESTRY
WE have the glorious privilege of being always in hot water if we
like. We are a shareholder in a Great Parochial British Joint
Stock Bank of Balderdash. We have a Vestry in our borough, and can
vote for a vestryman - might even BE a vestryman, mayhap, if we
were inspired by a lofty and noble ambition. Which we are not.
Our Vestry is a deliberative assembly of the utmost dignity and
importance. Like the Senate of ancient Rome, its awful gravity
overpowers (or ought to overpower) barbarian visitors. It sits in
the Capitol (we mean in the capital building erected for it),
chiefly on Saturdays, and shakes the earth to its centre with the
echoes of its thundering eloquence, in a Sunday paper.
To get into this Vestry in the eminent capacity of Vestryman,
gigantic efforts are made, and Herculean exertions used. It is
made manifest to the dullest capacity at every election, that if we
reject Snozzle we are done for, and that if we fail to bring in
Blunderbooze at the top of the poll, we are unworthy of the dearest
rights of Britons. Flaming placards are rife on all the dead walls
in the borough, public-houses hang out banners, hackney-cabs burst
into full-grown flowers of type, and everybody is, or should be, in
a paroxysm of anxiety.
At these momentous crises of the national fate, we are much
assisted in our deliberations by two eminent volunteers; one of
whom subscribes himself A Fellow Parishioner, the other, A Rate-
Payer. Who they are, or what they are, or where they are, nobody
knows; but, whatever one asserts, the other contradicts. They are
both voluminous writers, indicting more epistles than Lord
Chesterfield in a single week; and the greater part of their
feelings are too big for utterance in anything less than capital
letters. They require the additional aid of whole rows of notes of
admiration, like balloons, to point their generous indignation; and
they sometimes communicate a crushing severity to stars. As thus:
MEN OF MOONEYMOUNT.
Is it, or is it not, a * * * to saddle the parish with a debt of
2,745 pounds 6S. 9D., yet claim to be a RIGID ECONOMIST?
Is it, or is it not, a * * * to state as a fact what is proved to
be BOTH A MORAL AND A PHYSICAL IMPOSSIBILITY?
Is it, or is it not, a * * * to call 2,745 pounds 6S. 9D. nothing;
and nothing, something?
Do you, or do you NOT want a * * * TO REPRESENT YOU IN THE VESTRY?
Your consideration of these questions is recommended to you by
A FELLOW PARISHIONER.
It was to this important public document that one of our first
orators, MR. MAGG (of Little Winkling Street), adverted, when he
opened the great debate of the fourteenth of November by saying,
'Sir, I hold in my hand an anonymous slander' - and when the
interruption, with which he was at that point assailed by the
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opposite faction, gave rise to that memorable discussion on a point
of order which will ever be remembered with interest by
constitutional assemblies. In the animated debate to which we
refer, no fewer than thirty-seven gentlemen, many of them of great
eminence, including MR. WIGSBY (of Chumbledon Square), were seen
upon their legs at one time; and it was on the same great occasion
that DOGGINSON - regarded in our Vestry as 'a regular John Bull:'
we believe, in consequence of his having always made up his mind on
every subject without knowing anything about it - informed another
gentleman of similar principles on the opposite side, that if he
'cheek'd him,' he would resort to the extreme measure of knocking
his blessed head off.
This was a great occasion. But, our Vestry shines habitually. In
asserting its own pre-eminence, for instance, it is very strong.
On the least provocation, or on none, it will be clamorous to know
whether it is to be 'dictated to,' or 'trampled on,' or 'ridden
over rough-shod.' Its great watchword is Self-government. That is
to say, supposing our Vestry to favour any little harmless disorder
like Typhus Fever, and supposing the Government of the country to
be, by any accident, in such ridiculous hands, as that any of its
authorities should consider it a duty to object to Typhus Fever -
obviously an unconstitutional objection - then, our Vestry cuts in
with a terrible manifesto about Self-government, and claims its
independent right to have as much Typhus Fever as pleases itself.
Some absurd and dangerous persons have represented, on the other
hand, that though our Vestry may be able to 'beat the bounds' of
its own parish, it may not be able to beat the bounds of its own
diseases; which (say they) spread over the whole land, in an ever
expanding circle of waste, and misery, and death, and widowhood,
and orphanage, and desolation. But, our Vestry makes short work of
any such fellows as these.
It
was our Vestry - pink of Vestries as it is - that in support of
its favourite principle took the celebrated ground of denying the
existence of the last pestilence that raged in England, when the
pestilence was raging at the Vestry doors. Dogginson said it was
plums; Mr. Wigsby (of Chumbledon Square) said it was oysters; Mr.
Magg (of Little Winkling Street) said, amid great cheering, it was
the newspapers. The noble indignation of our Vestry with that un-
English institution the Board of Health, under those circumstances,
yields one of the finest passages in its history. It wouldn't hear
of rescue. Like Mr. Joseph Miller's Frenchman, it would be drowned
and nobody should save it. Transported beyond grammar by its
kindled ire, it spoke in unknown tongues, and vented unintelligible
bellowings, more like an ancient oracle than the modern oracle it
is admitted on all hands to be. Rare exigencies produce rare
things; and even our Vestry, new hatched to the woful time, came
forth a greater goose than ever.
But this, again, was a special occasion. Our Vestry, at more
ordinary periods, demands its meed of praise.
Our Vestry is eminently parliamentary. Playing at Parliament is
its favourite game. It is even regarded by some of its members as
a chapel of ease to the House of Commons: a Little Go to be passed
first. It has its strangers' gallery, and its reported debates
(see the Sunday paper before mentioned), and our Vestrymen are in
and out of order, and on and off their legs, and above all are
transcendently quarrelsome, after the pattern of the real original.
Our Vestry being assembled, Mr. Magg never begs to trouble Mr.
Wigsby with a simple inquiry. He knows better than that. Seeing
the honourable gentleman, associated in their minds with Chumbledon
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Square, in his place, he wishes to ask that honourable gentleman
what the intentions of himself, and those with whom he acts, may
be, on the subject of the paving of the district known as Piggleum
Buildings? Mr. Wigsby replies (with his eye on next Sunday's
paper) that in reference to the question which has been put to him
by the honourable gentleman opposite, he must take leave to say,
that if that honourable gentleman had had the courtesy to give him
notice of that question, he (Mr. Wigsby) would have consulted with