d homeless.

"I want to go home," I blubbered forth with the pertinacity of anguish,
as I was constrained into the parlour of the truculent, rod-bearing,
ferula-wielding Mr Root. I must have been a strange figure. I was
taken from my nurse's in a hurry, and, though my clothes were quite new,
my face entitled me to rank among the much vituperated unwashed. When a
little boy has very dirty hands, with which he rubs his dirty, tearful
face, it must be confessed that grief does not, in his person, appear
under a very lovely form. The first impression that I made on him who
was to hold almost everything that could constitute my happiness in his
power, was the very reverse of, favourable. My continued iteration of
"I want to go home," was anything but pleasing to the pedagogue. The
sentence itself is not music to a man keeping a boarding-school. With
the intuitive perception of childhood, through my tears, my heart
acknowledged an enemy. What my conductor said to him, did not tend to
soften his feelings towards me. I did not understand the details of his
communication, but I knew that I was as a captive, bound hand and foot,
and delivered over to a foreign bondage. The interview between the
contracting parties was short, and when over, my conductor departed
without deigning to bestow the smallest notice upon the most important
personage of this history. I was then rather twitched by the hand, than
led, by Mr Root, into the middle of his capacious school-room, and in
the midst of more than two hundred and fifty boys: my name was merely
mentioned to one of the junior ushers, and the master left me. Well
might I then apply that blundering, Examiner-be-praised line of Keats to
myself, for like Ruth:--

"I stood all tears among the alien corn."

A few boys came and stared at me, but I attracted the kindness of none.
There can be no doubt but that I was somewhat vulgar in my manners, and
my carriage was certainly quite unlike that of my companions. Some of
them even jeered me, but I regarded them not. A real grief is
armour-proof against ridicule. In a short time, it being six o'clock,
the supper was served out, consisting of a round of bread, all the
moisture of which had been allowed to evaporate, and an oblong,
diaphanous, yellow substance, one inch and a half by three, that I
afterwards learned might be known among the initiated as single
Gloucester. There was also a pewter mug for each, three-parts filled