counted on with certainty. But just then Harold was very proud. The week
before he had 'gone into tables,' and had been endowed with a new slate,
having a miniature sponge attached wherewith we washed the faces of
Charlotte's dolls, thereby producing an unhealthy pallor which struck
terror into the child's heart, always timorous regarding epidemic
visitations. As to 'tables,' nobody knew exactly what they were, least
of all Harold; but it was a step over the heads of the rest, and
therefore a subject for self-adulation and--generally speaking--airs; so
that Harold, hugging his slate and his chains, was out of the question
now. In such a matter, girls were worse than useless, as wanting the
necessary tenacity of will and contempt for self-constituted authority.
So eventually I slipped through the hedge a solitary protestant, and
issued forth on the lane what time the rest of the civilised world was
sitting down to lessons.

The scene was familiar enough; and yet, this morning, how different it
all seemed! The act, with its daring, tinted everything with new strange
hues; affecting the individual with a sort of bruised feeling just below
the pit of the stomach, that was intensified whenever his thoughts flew
back to the ink-stained smelly schoolroom. And could this be really me?
or was I only contemplating, from the schoolroom aforesaid, some other
jolly young mutineer, faring forth under the genial sun? Anyhow, here
was the friendly well, in its old place, half-way up the lane. Hither
the yoke-shouldering village-folk were wont to come to fill their
clinking buckets; when the drippings made worms of wet in the thick dust
of the road. They had flat wooden crosses inside each pail, which
floated on the top and (we were instructed) served to prevent the water
from slopping over. We used to wonder by what magic this strange
principle worked, and who first invented the crosses, and whether he got
a peerage for it. But indeed the well was a centre of mystery, for a
hornet's nest was somewhere hard by, and the very thought was fearsome.
Wasps we knew well and disdained, storming them in their fastnesses. But
these great Beasts, vestured in angry orange, three stings from
which--so 'twas averred--would kill a horse, these were of a different
kidney, and their dreadful drone suggested prudence and retreat. At this
time neither villagers nor hornets encroached on the stillness:
lessons, apparently, pervaded all nature. So, after da