them, for example, smoked
cigars--and some had already begun the practice of inebriation. One had
fought a duel with an Ensign in a marching, in consequence of a row at
the theatre--another actually kept a buggy and horse at a livery stable
in Covent Garden, and might be seen driving any Sunday in Hyde Park with
a groom with squared arms and armorial buttons by his side. Many of
the seniors were in love, and showed each other in confidence poems
addressed to, or letters and locks of hair received from, young
ladies--but Pen, a modest and timid youth, rather envied these than
imitated them as yet. He had not got beyond the theory as yet--the
practice of life was all to come. And by the way, ye tender mothers and
sober fathers of Christian families, a prodigious thing that theory of
life is as orally learned at a great public school. Why, if you could
hear those boys of fourteen who blush before mothers and sneak off in
silence in the presence of their daughters, talking among each other--it
would be the women's turn to blush then. Before he was twelve years old
and if while his mother fancied him an angel of candour, little Pen
had heard talk enough to make him quite awfully wise upon certain
points--and so, Madam, has your pretty little rosy-cheeked son, who is
coming home from school for the ensuing Christmas holidays. I don't say
that the boy is lost, or that the innocence has left him which he
had from 'Heaven, which is our home,' but that the shades of the
prison-house are closing very fast over him, and that we are helping as
much as possible to corrupt him.

Well--Pen had just made his public appearance in a coat with a tail, or
cauda virilis, and was looking most anxiously in his little study-glass
to see if his whiskers were growing, like those of more fortunate youths
his companions; and, instead of the treble voice with which he used to
speak and sing (for his singing voice was a very sweet one, and he used
when little to be made to perform 'Home, sweet Home,' 'My pretty Page,'
and a French song or two which his mother had taught him, and other
ballads for the delectation of the senior boys), had suddenly plunged
into a deep bass diversified by a squeak, which when he was called upon
to construe in school set the master and scholars laughing he was about
sixteen years old, in a word, when he was suddenly called away from his
academic studies.

It was at the close of the forenoon school, and Pen had been unno