resented being saddled with the presence of an unknown urchin.
The supposition had been that they would protect and foster my
religious practices; would encourage me, indeed, as my Father put
it, to approach the Throne of Grace with them at morning and
evening prayer. They made no pretence, however, to be considered
godly; they looked upon me as an intruder; and after a while the
younger, and ruder, of them openly let me know that they believed
I had been put into their room to 'spy upon' them; it had been a
plot, they knew, between their father and mine: and he darkly
warned me that I should suffer if 'anything got out'. I had,
however, no wish to trouble them, nor any faint interest in their
affairs. I soon discovered that they were absorbed in a silly
kind of amorous correspondence with the girls of a neighbouring
academy, but 'what were all such toys to me?'

These young fellows, who ought long before to have left the
school, did nothing overtly unkind to me, but they condemned me
to silence. They ceased to address me except with an occasional
command. By reason of my youth, I was in bed and asleep before my
companions arrived upstairs, and in the morning I was always
routed up and packed about my business while they still were
drowsing. But the fact that I had been cut off from my coevals by
night, cut me off from them also by day--so that I was nothing to
them, neither a boarder nor a day-scholar, neither flesh, fish
nor fowl. The loneliness of my life was extreme, and that I
always went home on Saturday afternoon and returned on Monday
morning still further checked my companionships at school. For a
long time, round the outskirts of that busy throng of opening
lives, I 'wandered lonely as a cloud', and sometimes I was more
unhappy than I had ever been before. No one, however, bullied me,
and though I was dimly and indefinably witness to acts of
uncleanness and cruelty, I was the victim of no such acts and the
recipient of no dangerous confidences. I suppose that my queer
reputation for sanctity, half dreadful, half ridiculous,
surrounded me with a non-conducting atmosphere.

We are the victims of hallowed proverbs, and one of the most
classic of these tells us that 'the child is father of the man'.
But in my case I cannot think that this was true. In mature years
I have always been gregarious, a lover of my kind, dependent upon
the company of friends for the very pulse of moral life. To be
marooned, to be s