as the chill hand of some corpse, thrust up from beneath,
that was seizing me in order to drag me downwards--and a hundred times,
as the long flame from the candle flared up tremulously, and shook the
deep shadows that encompassed me around, did I fancy that there were
very hideous faces indeed mouthing at me amidst the gloom--and my own
gigantic shadow--it was a vast horror of itself personified! It was a
cruel thing, even in Mr Root, to leave me alone so many hours in that
stupendous gloom; but his wife--fie upon her!

Considering how my imagination had been before worked upon, even from my
earliest childhood, and the great nervous excitability of my
temperament, it is a wonder that my mind did not reel, if not succumb--
but I now began to combat the approaches of one sort of insanity with
the actual presence of another--I _wrote verses_. That was "tempering
the wind to the shorn lamb," as Sterne would have expressed it, after
the prettiest fashion imaginable.

Had I not the reader so completely at my mercy--did I not think him or
her not only the gentlest but also the most deserving of all the progeny
of Japhet--did I not think that it would be the very acme of ingratitude
to impose upon him or her, I would certainly transcribe a centaine, or
so, of these juvenile poems. It is true, they are very bad--but, then,
that is a proof that they are undeniably genuine. I really have, in
some things, a greatness of soul. I will refrain--but in order that
these effusions may not be lost to the world, I offer them to the
annuals for 1839; not so much for the sake of pecuniary compensation,
but in order to improve the reading of some of that very unreadable
class of books.

Well, during these dismal holidays, I wrote verses and began to take, or
to make, my madness methodical. The boys came back, and having left me
a very Bobadil, they found me a juvenile Bavius.

I now began to approach my thirteenth year, and, what with my rhyming
and my fistical prowess,--my character for bravery and the peculiarity
of my situation, as it regarded its mystery--I became that absurd thing
that the French call "_une tete montee_." Root had ceased to flog me.
I could discover that he even began to fear me--and just in proportion
as he seemed to avoid all occasion to punish me, I became towards him
mild, observant, and respectful. The consequence was, that, as I was no
longer frightened out of my wits at church, from very weariness, and