V. Pastry Cookery is certainly
not so good. I have often eaten half a crown's worth (including, I
trust, ginger-beer) at our school pastry-cook's, and that is a proof
that the pastry must have been very good, for could I do as much now? I
passed by the pastry-cook's shop lately, having occasion to visit my old
school. It looked a very dingy old baker's; misfortunes may have come
over him--those penny tarts certainly did NOT look so nice as I remember
them: but he may have grown careless as he has grown old (I should judge
him to be now about ninety-six years of age), and his hand may have lost
its cunning.

Not that we were not great epicures. I remember how we constantly
grumbled at the quantity of the food in our master's house--which on my
conscience I believe was excellent and plentiful--and how we tried once
or twice to eat him out of house and home. At the pastry-cook's we may
have over-eaten ourselves (I have admitted half a crown's worth for
my own part, but I don't like to mention the REAL figure for fear
of perverting the present generation of boys by my monstrous
confession)--we may have eaten too much, I say. We did; but what then?
The school apothecary was sent for: a couple of small globules at night,
a trifling preparation of senna in the morning, and we had not to go to
school, so that the draught was an actual pleasure.

For our amusements, besides the games in vogue, which were pretty much
in old times as they are now (except cricket, par exemple--and I wish
the present youth joy of their bowling, and suppose Armstrong and
Whitworth will bowl at them with light field-pieces next), there were
novels--ah! I trouble you to find such novels in the present day! O
Scottish Chiefs, didn't we weep over you! O Mysteries of Udolpho, didn't
I and Briggs Minor draw pictures out of you, as I have said? Efforts,
feeble indeed, but still giving pleasure to us and our friends. "I say,
old boy, draw us Vivaldi tortured in the Inquisition," or, "Draw us Don
Quixote and the windmills, you know," amateurs would say, to boys who
had a love of drawing. "Peregrine Pickle" we liked, our fathers admiring
it, and telling us (the sly old boys) it was capital fun; but I think
I was rather bewildered by it, though "Roderick Random" was and remains
delightful. I don't remember having Sterne in the school library, no
doubt because the works of that divine were not considered decent for
young people. Ah! not against thy genius, O fa