unish. The hypocrite! the epicure! he reserved
all that luxury for himself. Add to this, that he was very ignorant out
of the Tutor's Assistant, and that he wrote a most abominably good hand
(that usual sign of a poor and trifle-occupied mind), and now you have a
very fair picture of Mr Root. I have said that he was a most cruel
tyrant: yet Nero himself ought not to be blackened; and I must say this
for my master's humanity, that I had been at school two days before I
was flogged; and then it was for the enormity of not knowing my own
name. "Rattlin," said the pedagogue. No reply. "Master Rattlin," in a
shriller tone. Answer there was none. "Master Ralph Rattlin." Many
started, but "Ralph Brandon" thought it concerned not him. But it did
indeed. I believe that I had been told my new name, but I had forgotten
it in my grief, and now in grief and in pain I was again taught it.
When, for the first time, in reality, I tasted that acid and bitter
fruit of the tree of knowledge, old Isaac's (my soldier schoolmaster)
mock brushings were remembered with heartfelt regret.

At that time the road to learning was strewed neither with flowers nor
palm-leaves, but with the instigating birch. The schoolmaster had not
yet gone abroad, but he flogged most diligently at home, and, verily, I
partook amply of that diligence. I was flogged full, and I was flogged
fasting; when I deserved it, and when I did not; I was flogged for
speaking too loudly, and for not speaking loud enough, and for holding
my tongue. Moreover, one morning I rode the horse without the saddle,
because my face was dirty, and the next, because I pestered the
maid-servant to wash it clean. I was flogged because my shoes were
dirty, and again because I attempted to wipe them clean with my
pocket-handkerchief. I was flogged for playing, and for staying in the
school-room and not going out to play. The bigger boys used to beat me,
and I was then flogged for fighting. It is hard to say for what I was
not flogged. Things, the most contradictory, all tended to one end, and
that was my own. At length, he flogged me into serious ill-health, and
then he stayed his hand, and I found relief on a bed of sickness. Even
now I look back to those days of persecution with horror. Those were
the times of large schools, rods steeped in brine (_actual fact_),
intestine insurrections, the bumping of obnoxious ushers, and the
"barring out" of tyrannical masters. A schoo