with whom he had a personal interview, so
fine a prospectus and so nice a calculation that before my holidays were
over, he was installed in a very handsome office in the county town,
with private apartments over it, and a salary of L500 a-year, for
advocating the cause of his distressed fellow-creatures, including
noblemen, squires, yeomanry, farmers, and all yearly subscribers in the
New Proprietary Agricultural Anti-Innovating-Shire Weekly Gazette. At
the head of his newspaper Uncle Jack caused to be engraved a crown,
supported by a flail and a crook, with the motto, "Pro rege et grege."
And that was the way in which Uncle Jack printed his pats of butter.

(1) "We talked sad rubbish when we first began," says Mr. Cobden, in one
of his speeches.

CHAPTER V.

I seemed to myself to have made a leap in life when I returned to
school. I no longer felt as a boy. Uncle Jack, out of his own purse, had
presented me with my first pair of Wellington boots; my mother had been
coaxed into allowing me a small tail to jackets hitherto tail-less; my
collars, which had been wont, spaniel-like, to flap and fall about my
neck, now, terrier-wise, stood erect and rampant, encompassed with a
circumvallation of whalebone, buckram, and black silk. I was, in truth,
nearly seventeen, and I gave myself the airs of a man. Now, be it
observed that that crisis in adolescent existence wherein we first pass
from Master Sisty into Mr. Pisistratus, or Pisistratus Caxton, Esq.;
wherein we arrogate, and with tacit concession from our elders, the
long-envied title of young man,--always seems a sudden and imprompt
upshooting and elevation. We do not mark the gradual preparations
thereto; we remember only one distinct period, in which all the
signs and symptoms burst and effloresced together,--Wellington boots,
coat-tail, cravat, down on the upper lip, thoughts on razors, reveries
on young ladies, and a new kind of sense of poetry.

I began now to read steadily, to understand what I did read, and to cast
some anxious looks towards the future, with vague notions that I had
a place to win in the world, and that nothing is to be won without
perseverance and labor; and so I went on till I was seventeen and at the
head of the school, when I received the two letters I subjoin.

1.--FROM AUGUSTINE CAXTON, Esq.

My Dear Son,--I have informed Dr. Herman that you will not return
to him after the approaching holidays. You are old enough now to