ch I learned on
my voyage home, and to some I imparted a few words of Hindustanee.

I also entered into all their amusements; and as I had a great dislike
to anything like bullying, I would never allow those I could master to
ill-treat the weaker ones, and I, on more than one occasion, stood up
against a boy much stronger than myself, to defend a little fellow he
was going to thrash. We fought, and though he got the best of it, he
suffered so severely that he never again attempt to interfere with me.
I thus gained all the advantage a victory could have given me. I was
not unhappy at the school; but I found the life rather irksome after the
freedom I had been accustomed to enjoy, and I studied as hard as I was
able, to emancipate myself from it.

Although I had many friends, I had few intimates--indeed, to no one did
I confide the story of my being discovered at sea in a boat with my
sister; and I was supposed to be the nephew of Sir Charles Plowden.
Among the boys I liked best, was one called Walter Blount. He was
almost friendless, though his birth was good; and he had fortune
sufficient to enable him to be sent to this school, with the intention
of his proceeding afterwards to Oxford or Cambridge. He was a
fine-spirited lad. He was nearly two years younger than I was, and
accordingly looked up to me as his superior. I first gained his
friendship by saving him from a thrashing which Hardman, the greatest
bully in the school, was about to give him.

"If you touch him you will have to fight us both," I exclaimed; "and I
alone am not afraid of you."

The bully doubled his fists, and looked very fierce, but stalked away
without striking a blow. I got Blount out of several scrapes; once he
had been letting off fireworks in a part of the garden not seen from the
house, and being disturbed by the report that one of the ushers was
coming, he thrust a handful of touchpaper, part of which was ignited,
into his pocket. I luckily met him as he was passing the washing-room,
and turning him as he was smoking away, I tore out his burning pockets,
and plunged them into the water. We afterwards had to cut away the
burnt lining, and to sew up his pockets, so that what had happened might
not be discovered.

Another time, he, with a dozen or more other boys, had planned an
expedition into the master's garden at night to get fruit. He did not
join it, I am sure, for the object of obtaining the fruit, but merely
for the sake