by parents for
their offspring, or of young lives which, from the earliest dawn of
infancy, had been one horrible endurance of cruelty and neglect. There
were little faces which should have been handsome, darkened with the
scowl of sullen, dogged suffering; there was childhood with the light of
its eye quenched, its beauty gone, and its helplessness alone remaining;
there were vicious-faced boys, brooding, with leaden eyes, like
malefactors in a jail; and there were young creatures on whom the sins
of their frail parents had descended, weeping even for the mercenary
nurses they had known, and lonesome even in their loneliness. With every
kindly sympathy and affection blasted in its birth, with every young and
healthy feeling flogged and starved down, with every revengeful passion
that can fester in swollen hearts, eating its evil way to their core in
silence, what an incipient Hell was breeding here!

And yet this scene, painful as it was, had its grotesque features,
which, in a less interested observer than Nicholas, might have provoked
a smile. Mrs Squeers stood at one of the desks, presiding over an
immense basin of brimstone and treacle, of which delicious compound she
administered a large instalment to each boy in succession: using for
the purpose a common wooden spoon, which might have been originally
manufactured for some gigantic top, and which widened every young
gentleman's mouth considerably: they being all obliged, under heavy
corporal penalties, to take in the whole of the bowl at a gasp. In
another corner, huddled together for companionship, were the little
boys who had arrived on the preceding night, three of them in very large
leather breeches, and two in old trousers, a something tighter fit than
drawers are usually worn; at no great distance from these was seated
the juvenile son and heir of Mr Squeers--a striking likeness of his
father--kicking, with great vigour, under the hands of Smike, who
was fitting upon him a pair of new boots that bore a most suspicious
resemblance to those which the least of the little boys had worn on
the journey down--as the little boy himself seemed to think, for he
was regarding the appropriation with a look of most rueful amazement.
Besides these, there was a long row of boys waiting, with countenances
of no pleasant anticipation, to be treacled; and another file, who
had just escaped from the infliction, making a variety of wry mouths
indicative of anything but satisfac