lecture for matins. I was a sort of leader among
the jolly dogs I consorted with."

"My earlier education gave a raciness and nature to my delineations of
'life' which delighted them. But somehow or other I grew wearied of this
sort of existence. About a year after I was of age my fortune was more
than three parts spent; I fell ill with drinking and grew dull with
remorse: need I add that my comrades left me to myself? A fit of
the spleen, especially if accompanied with duns, makes one wofully
misanthropic; so, when I recovered from my illness, I set out on a tour
through Great Britain and France,--alone, and principally on foot. Oh,
the rapture of shaking off the half friends and cold formalities of
society and finding oneself all unfettered, with no companion but
Nature, no guide but youth, and no flatterer but hope!"

"Well, my young friend, I travelled for two years, and saw even in that
short time enough of this busy world to weary and disgust me with
its ordinary customs. I was not made to be polite, still less to be
ambitious. I sighed after the coarse comrades and the free tents of my
first associates; and a thousand remembrances of the gypsy wanderings,
steeped in all the green and exhilarating colours of childhood,
perpetually haunted my mind. On my return from my wanderings I found a
letter from my sister, who, having become a widow, had left Wales, and
had now fixed her residence in a well visited watering-place in the west
of England. I had never yet seen her, and her letter was a fine-ladylike
sort of epistle, with a great deal of romance and a very little sense,
written in an extremely pretty hand, and ending with a quotation from
Pope (I never could endure Pope, nor indeed any of the poets of the days
of Anne and her successors). It was a beautiful season of the year: I
had been inured to pedestrian excursions; so I set off on foot to see
my nearest surviving relative. On the way, I fell in (though on a very
different spot) with the very encampment you saw last night. By heavens,
that was a merry meeting to me! I joined, and journeyed with them for
several days: never do I remember a happier time. Then, after many years
of bondage and stiffness, and accordance with the world, I found myself
at ease, like a released bird; with what zest did I join in the rude
jokes and the knavish tricks, the stolen feasts and the roofless nights
of those careless vagabonds!"

"I left my fellow-travellers at the entranc