out of school, few children are wise enough to discover it. We do
not refer to children who go to school unwillingly--thoughtless
wights--whose heads are full of play, and whose hands are
prone to mischief:--that these should delight in escaping the
restraints of the school-room, and the eye of its watchful
master, is a matter of course. We refer to children generally,
the good and the bad, the studious and the idle, in short, to
all who belong to the _genus_ Boy. Perhaps we should include the
_genus_ Girl, also, but of that we are not certain; for, not
to dwell upon the fact that we have never been a girl, and are,
therefore, unable to enter into the feelings of girlhood, we hold
that girls are better than boys, as women are better than men,
and that, consequently, they take more kindly to school life.
What boys are we know, unless the breed has changed very much
since we were young, which is now upwards of--but our age
does not concern the reader. We did not take kindly to school,
although we were sadly in need of what we could only obtain in
school, viz., learning. We went to school with reluctance,
and remained with discomfort; for we were not as robust as the
children of our neighbors. We hated school. We did not dare to
play truant, however, like other boys whom we knew (we were not
courageous enough for that); so we kept on going, fretting, and
pining, and--learning.

Oh the long days (the hot days of summer, and the cold days of
winter), when we had to sit for hours on hard wooden benches,
before uncomfortable desks, bending over grimy slates and
ink-besprinkled "copy books," and poring over studies in which
we took no interest--geography, which we learned by rote;
arithmetic, which always evaded us, and grammar, which we never