those friendless holidays. The long warm days of summer never return but
they bring with them a gloom from the haunting memory of those whole-day
leaves, when, by some strange arrangement, we were turned out for the livelong
day, upon our own hands, whether we had friends to go to or none. I remember
those bathing excursions to the New River which L. recalls with such relish,
better, I think, than he can?for he was a home-seeking lad, and did not much
care for such water pastimes: How merrily we would sally forth into the fields;
and strip under the first warmth of the sun; and wanton like young dace2 in
the streams; getting us appetites for noon, which those of us that were pen
niless (our scanty morning crust long since exhausted) had not the means of
allaying?while the cattle, and the birds, and the fishes were at feed about us
and we had nothing to satisfy our cravings?the very beauty of the day, and
the exercise of the pastime, and the sense of liberty, setting a keener edge
upon them! How faint and languid, finally, we would return, towards nightfall,
to our desired morsel, half-rejoicing, half-reluctant that the hours of our
uneasy liberty had expired! It was worse in the days of winter, to go prowling about the streets object-
less?shivering at cold windows of print shops, to extract a little amusement;
or haply, as a last resort in the hopes of a little novelty, to pay a fifty-times
7. Overdone. 'Scrags': necks. 1. Coleridge had come to school from Ottery St. 8. The lean part of a loin of pork. Mary, Devonshire, in the southwest of England. 9. The prophet Elijah, who was fed by the ravens 2. A small quick-darting fish. in 1 Kings 17. 'Cates': delicacies.
.
498 / CHARLES LAMB
repeated visit (where our individual faces should be as well known to the
warden as those of his own charges) to the Lions in the Tower?to whose
levee, by courtesy immemorial, we had a prescriptive title to admission.3
L.'s governor (so we called the patron who presented us to the foundation)4
lived in a manner under his paternal roof. Any complaint which he had to
make was sure of being attended to. This was understood at Christ's, and was
an effectual screen to him against the severity of masters, or worse tyranny of
the monitors. The oppressions of these young brutes are heart-sickening to
call to recollection. I have been called out of my bed, and waked for the pur
pose, in the coldest winter nights?and this not once, but night after night?
in my shirt, to receive the discipline of a leathern thong and eleven other
sufferers, because it pleased my callow overseer, when there has been any
talking heard after we were gone to bed, to make the six last beds in the
dormitory, where the youngest children of us slept, answerable for an offense
they neither dared to commit nor had the power to hinder. The same execrable
tyranny drove the younger part of us from the fires, when our feet were per
ishing with snow; and, under the cruelest penalties, forbade the indulgence
of a drink of water when we lay in sleepless summer nights fevered with the
season and the day's sports. There was one H , who, I learned, in after days was seen expiating some maturer offense in the hulks.5 (Do I flatter myself in fancying that this might
be the planter of that name, who suffered?at Nevis, I think, or St. Kitts6?
some few years since? My friend Tobin was the benevolent instrument of
bringing him to the gallows.) This petty Nero actually branded a boy who had
offended him with a red-hot iron; and nearly starved forty of us with exacting
contributions, to the one-half of our bread, to pamper a young ass, which,
incredible as it may seem, with the connivance of the nurse's daughter (a
young flame of his) he had contrived to smuggle in, and keep upon the leads7
of the ward, as they called our dormitories. This game went on for better than
