Shrewsbury

sband, who at first, with an eye to my knowledge and his own deficiencies, had been more civil to me, took the same tone; and not only that, but, finding that I was to be trusted, he came less and less into school, until at last he would only appear for a few minutes in the day, and to carve when we had meat, and to see the lights extinguished at night. This without any added value for me; so that the better I served him--and for a year I managed his school for him--the less he favoured me, and at last thought a nod all the converse he owed me in the day.

Consigned to this solitary life by those above me, it was not likely that I should find compensation in the society of lads to whom I stood in an odious light, and of whom the oldest was no more than fourteen. For what was our life? Such hours as we did not spend in the drudgery of school, or in our beds, we passed in a yard on the dank side of the house, a grassless place, muddy in winter and dusty in summer, overshadowed by one skeleton tree; and wh