notice of my unfeeling playfellows, I have sat to mumble the solitary slice of gingerbread allotted me by the bounty of considerate friends, and have ached at heart because I could not spare a portion of it, as I saw other boys do, to some favorite boy; for if I know my own heart, I was never selfish,—­never possessed a luxury which I did not hasten to communicate to others; but my food, alas! was none; it was an indispensable necessary; I could as soon have spared the blood in my veins, as have parted that with my companions.

Well, no one stage of suffering lasts forever:  we should grow reconciled to it at length, I suppose, if it did.  The miseries of my school-days had their end; I was once more restored to the paternal dwelling.  The affectionate solicitude of my parents was directed to the good-natured purpose of concealing, even from myself, the infirmity which haunted me.  I was continually told that I was growing, and the appetite I displayed was humanely represented as being nothing more than a symptom and an effect of that.  I used even to be complimented upon it.  But this temporary fiction could not endure above a year or two.  I ceased to grow, but, alas!  I did not cease my demands for alimentary sustenance.

Those times are long since past, and with them have ceased to exist the fond concealment—­the indulgent blindness—­the delicate overlooking—­the compassionate fiction.  I and my infirmity are left exposed and bare to the broad, unwinking eye of the world, which nothing can elude.  My meals are scanned, my mouthfuls weighed in a balance; that which appetite demands is set down to the account of gluttony—­a sin which my whole soul abhors—­nay, which Nature herself has put it out of my power to commit.  I am constitutionally disenabled from that vice; for how can he be guilty of excess who never can get enough?  Let them cease, then, to watch my plate; and leave off their ungracious comparisons of it to the seven baskets of fragments, and the supernaturally replenished cup of old Baucis:  and be thankful that their more phlegmatic stomachs, not their virtue, have saved them from the like reproaches.  I do not see that any of them desist from eating till the holy rage of hunger, as some one calls it, is supplied.  Alas!  I am doomed to stop short of that continence.

What am I to do?  I am by disposition inclined to conviviality and the social meal.  I am no gourmand:  I require no dainties:  I should despise the board of Heliogabalus, except for its long sitting.  Those vivacious, long-continued meals of the latter Romans, indeed, I justly envy; but the kind of fare which the Curii and Dentati put up with, I could be content with.  Dentatus I have been called, among other unsavory jests.  Doublemeal is another name which my acquaintance have palmed upon me, for an innocent piece of policy which I put in practice for some time without being found out; which was—­going the round of my friends, beginning with the most primitive feeders among them,