ged to
speak again so soon) made an effort to extricate his mother--involved
himself in a series of pecuniary disasters, which commercial people
call, I believe, transactions--struggled for a little while to get out
of them in the character of an independent gentleman--failed--and then
spiritlessly availed himself of the oleaginous refuge of the soap and
candle trade. His mother always looked down upon him after this; but
borrowed money of him also--in order to show, I suppose, that her
maternal interest in her son was not quite extinct. My father tried
to follow her example--in his wife's interests, of course; but the
soap-boiler brutally buttoned up his pockets, and told my father to go
into business for himself. Thus it happened that we were certainly a
poor family, in spite of the fine appearance we made, the fashionable
street we lived in, the neat brougham we kept, and the clumsy and
expensive footman who answered our door.

What was to be done with me in the way of education?

If my father had consulted his means, I should have been sent to a
cheap commercial academy; but he had to consult his relationship to Lady
Malkinshaw; so I was sent to one of the most fashionable and famous of
the great public schools. I will not mention it by name, because I don't
think the masters would be proud of my connection with it. I ran away
three times, and was flogged three times. I made four aristocratic
connections, and had four pitched battles with them: three thrashed me,
and one I thrashed. I learned to play at cricket, to hate rich people,
to cure warts, to write Latin verses, to swim, to recite speeches, to
cook kidneys on toast, to draw caricatures of the masters, to construe
Greek plays, to black boots, and to receive kicks and serious advice
resignedly. Who will say that the fashionable public school was of no
use to me after that?

After I left school, I had the narrowest escape possible of intruding
myself into another place of accommodation for distinguished people; in
other words, I was very nearly being sent to college. Fortunately for
me, my father lost a lawsuit just in the nick of time, and was obliged
to scrape together every farthing of available money that he possessed
to pay for the luxury of going to law. If he could have saved his seven
shillings, he would certainly have sent me to scramble for a place in
the pit of the great university theater; but his purse was empty, and
his son was not eligible the