Here was a strange new "school" for our friend John now in his eighth
year! Out of which the little Anthony and he drank doubtless at all
pores, vigorously as they had done in no school before. A change
total and immediate. Somniferous green Llanblethian has suddenly been
blotted out; presto, here are wakeful Passy and the noises of paved
Paris instead. Innocent ingenious Mr. Reece in drab breeches and
white stockings, he with his mild Christmas galas and peaceable rules
of Dilworth and Butterworth, has given place to such a saturnalia of
panoramic, symbolic and other teachers and monitors, addressing all
the five senses at once. Who John's express tutors were, at Passy, I
never heard; nor indeed, especially in his case, was it much worth
inquiring. To him and to all of us, the expressly appointed
schoolmasters and schoolings we get are as nothing, compared with the
unappointed incidental and continual ones, whose school-hours are all
the days and nights of our existence, and whose lessons, noticed or
unnoticed, stream in upon us with every breath we draw. Anthony says
they attended a French school, though only for about three months; and
he well remembers the last scene of it, "the boys shouting _Vive
l'Empereur_ when Napoleon came back."

Of John Sterling's express schooling, perhaps the most important
feature, and by no means a favorable one to him, was the excessive
fluctuation that prevailed in it. Change of scene, change of teacher,
_both_ express and implied, was incessant with him; and gave his young
life a nomadic character,--which surely, of all the adventitious
tendencies that could have been impressed upon him, so volatile, swift
and airy a being as him, was the one he needed least. His gentle
pious-hearted Mother, ever watching over him in all outward changes,
and assiduously keeping human pieties and good affections alive in
him, was probably the best counteracting element in his lot. And on