O the cruelty of separating a poor lad from his early homestead!  The yearnings which I used to have towards it in those unfledged years!  How, in my dreams, would my native town (far in the west) come back, with its church, and trees, and faces!  How I would wake weeping, and in the anguish of my heart exclaim upon sweet Calne in Wiltshire!

To this late hour of my life, I trace impressions left by the recollection of those friendless holidays.  The long warm days of summer never return but they bring with them a gloom from the haunting memory of those whole-day-leaves, when, by some strange arrangement, we were turned out, for the live-long day, upon our own hands, whether we had friends to go to, or none.  I remember those bathing-excursions to the New-River, which L. recalls with such relish, better, I think, than he can—­for he was a home-seeking lad, and did not much care for such water-pastimes:—­How merrily we would sally forth into the fields; and strip under the first warmth of the sun; and wanton like young dace in the streams; getting us appetites for noon, which those of us that were pennyless (our scanty morning crust long since exhausted) had not the means of allaying—­while the cattle, and the birds, and the fishes, were at feed about us, and we had nothing to satisfy our cravings—­the very beauty of the day, and the exercise of the pastime, and the sense of liberty, setting a keener edge upon them!—­How faint and languid, finally, we would return, towards nightfall, to our desired morsel, half-rejoicing, half-reluctant, that the hours of our uneasy liberty had expired!

It was worse in the days of winter, to go prowling about the streets objectless—­shivering at cold windows of printshops, to extract a little amusement; or haply, as a last resort, in the hope of a little novelty, to pay a fifty-times repeated visit (where our individual faces should be as well known to the warden as those of his own charges) to the Lions in the Tower—­to whose levee, by courtesy immemorial, we had a prescriptive title to admission.

L.’s governor (so we called the patron who presented us to the foundation) lived in a manner under his paternal roof.  Any complaint which he had to make was sure of being attended to.  This was understood at Christ’s, and was an effectual screen to him against the severity of masters, or worse tyranny of the monitors.  The oppressions of these young brutes are heart-sickening to call to recollection.  I have been called out of my bed, and waked for the purpose, in the coldest winter nights—­and this not once, but night after night—­in my shirt, to receive the discipline of a leathern thong, with eleven other sufferers, because it pleased my callow overseer, when there has been any talking heard after we were gone to bed, to make the six last beds in the dormitory, where the youngest children of us slept, answerable for an offence they neither dared to commit, nor had the power to hinder.—­The same execrable tyranny drove the younger part of us from the fires, when our feet were perishing with snow; and, under the cruelest penalties, forbad the indulgence of a drink of water, when we lay in sleepless summer nights, fevered with the season, and the day’s sports.