expected Bertie would be ready to take his seat on the coach-top at the Swan with Two Necks, or the Belle Sauvage, whichever was most convenient, to be safely deposited at the gates of Mr. Vyvian's "Academic Institution," as the boarding-school of that gentleman was termed in his prospectuses. The notice was not a very extended one: two days only were given Mrs. Grafton for preparation; but this was time enough, Mr. C. said, for the boy's clothes to be got ready and packed up, which was all that was wanted. Mrs. Grafton had not been consulted respecting the destination of Bertie: this had not been once thought of as a reasonable idea. "A gift horse," said Mr. C., “is not to be looked in the mouth.'

As regards the school, it was perhaps as good a one as could be found for the money. Twenty pounds a year, (extras included), for board, lodging, washing, and education, leaves no wide margin for luxuries in either department. But the "Institution" had three recommendations in the eyes of the partners: first, it was as reasonably cheap as could be expected; second, it was no great distance from London: and since sending the boy to school included coach-hire, that was a consideration; and, third, it professed to be "commercial;" and as Bertie was thereafter to be "taken into the concern, somehow or other," it was time for his commercial education to be seen to. And then, the traveller of the firm, who was an authority in small matters, had a son at Mr. Vyvian's " Academic Institution," and, (under the rose,) a commission on every new boy obtained by his recommendation. This latter circumstance settled the business.

It was mid-day when Bertie arrived. The boys -excepting those who were "kept in"-were in the play-ground, and making as much noise as might be reasonably expected from forty pairs of vigorous lungs just let loose. The pale orphan boy sickened as he heard it, and, mechanically following the teacher-the one assistant of the establishment who had been, as he testily said, half-an-hour looking out for the coach, he passed through the throng of his future schoolfellows, without looking to the right hand or to the left, and was ushered into the presence of the principal. Mr. Vyvian did not often enter the play-ground; but on this day he departed from his usual custom, and was presently seen approaching a party of marble-players, leading the new boy by the hand.

"Here is a young gentleman you ought to know," he said to Bertie, singling one out from the group. "I need not introduce you to each other; you have often met Robinson before, I dare

say."

Bertie raised his eyes from the ground, and cast a careless glance at the lad thus pointed out. "I don't know him, sir," he said, and turned away.

"Dear me, I thought certainly you must have been acquainted," observed Mr. Vyvian, good-humouredly. It seemed strange to him that the son of a partner in a London-house should not have been a close acquaintance and playfellow, from babyhood upwards, with a son of the commercial traveller of the same firm :-" You know Bertie Grafton, don't you, Robinson ?"

"No, sir, and don't want: I have heard about him, though," replied the boy, sullenly; and went on with his game. For one moment Mr. Vyvian

seemed angry, and an involuntary twitching of the right arm betrayed a violent inclination to box somebody's ears; but it would not do to quarrel with Robinson and Robinson's father on so slight a cause, and it was early yet to commence dis ipline with a new boy; so he turned shortly round, and, leaving Bertie to scrape acquaintance with whomsoever he might, in the way that pleased him best, he retired from the scene.

It was an inauspicious commencement of Bertie's new school-experience. Within a quarter of an hour of his arrival, he had vexed Mr. Vyvian, made an enemy of Sam Robinson, and secured the disfavour of the assistant teacher, in the first place by travelling on a coach which happened to be behind its time; and in the second, by reaching the "Academic Institution" at all. Mr. Pennepoint was overworked already, and wanted no more boys to look after.

"Who is he? Who is he?" was whispered and echoed by a dozen voices, as Bertie strode haughtily away, and as soon as Mr. Vyvian had disappeared. "What do you know about him, Robinson ?"

Robinson laughed scornfully; and before the day was over, there was scarcely a boy in the school who had not an idea, more or less distinct, that Bertie Grafton had been very grand in his relative connections, but there had been a great "comedown," and that now his mother was obliged to work for her living-at washing or needlework, or some such low employment, as was supposedwhile Bertie had been taken from the "tip-top" school he used to go to, and was sent to the Academic Institution" out of charity.

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Boys are only little men--not angels. The boy Robinson had an average amount of amiability in his composition; and if Bertie had shaken hands cordially with him, he might have honoured him with his patronage, though he did know that his father had often, in former times, called Mr. Grafton a tyrant; but as the "proud beggar," as he termed poor Bertie, had chosen to come riding the high horse" to the new school, like that, he should soon find that his "comb was cut." Yes, boys are like men; and men are very much like sheep: if one takes a certain road, right or wrong, or jumps through a gap, a whole flock will follow. There were some of Bertie's schoolfellows in whom the story of his sorrows and losses, his pale and dejected countenance, and his garments of deep mourning, would have wrought pity and sympathy had there been one to set the example; and there might have been one found to do this, if his own bearing had not seemed to repel it. But as he stood proudly aloof from the companionship which he might have shared but would not, commiseration vanished, and gave place to indifference and dislike.

Again we reiterate, that boys are like men: it is easy for both to trample on the fallen, and to sneer at the poor; it is so gratifying, too, to see those who were once above us reduced to our own level, or below it. And there were few boys in Mr. Vyvian's " Academic Institution" who were not uncon sciously disposed to indulge their self-complacency at the expense of their poor schoolfellow, who had been sent among them" out of charity." Bertie was sharp-sighted enough to observe this, and

:

quick-tempered enough to resent it this was one thing another was, his pride of station-that was touch. To be sent to the same school with the son of his father's servant, and with the sons of bakers and butchers, and common retail tradesmen (we here merely give words to Bertie's feelings); with boys who wore corduroys, and didn't care a fig whether their shoes were clean or dirty; who had vulgar habits and talked slang; and to feel that even for this he was indebted to the benevolence of men who had benefited by his father's exertions, and who, while thus befriending him, as they believed, were dealing ungenerously, at least to his widowed mother-all this was gall and wormwood to the proud boy. And so was the knowledge that his future destination, and the whole course of his future prospects, had been changed by one terrible stroke. Mr. Grafton had made no secret of his intention to send his boy, eventually, to college. More than this, he had unwittingly encouraged a notion in Bertie's mind that trading of any sort was a degrading occupation. These notions had been still further fostered by the boy's former companions and schoolfellows. And now it had come to this, that he was not only to be trained to commercial life-supposing the intentions of the partners were carried into effect-but he must enter it on the most humiliating footing, and be the drudge of strangers on the very spot where his father had exercised the authority of a principal.

There was another ingredient, too, in Bertie's mortification. He was, as his father had truly enough said, clever; but it was in those particular departments of school-education which are of the least utility in the rough and common business of life. He could read Virgil; but he could not write a decent schoolboy hand. He had studied Greek particles; but practical arithmetic was a mystery and a bore. It happened, therefore, that on the very first day of Bertie's new school-experience, he found himself ignominiously, as he deemed, thrust down into a class of junior arithmeticians, whose unconcealed ridicule he provoked by blunder after blunder, while he incurred the caustic remarks and professed pity of his tutor, bearing upon his neglected education.

Pride and obstinacy came to Bertie's aid, or rather, we should say, to his hindrance. There was not a boy in the "Academic Institution" to whom he did not hold himself incontestably superior in all worthy knowledge, as he would have said; and as to the petty, peddling, mechanical branches of education, in which he betrayed so much inexperience and ignorance, if he had chosen to give it, a month's application would have removed his glaring deficiencies. But he would not give it: he felt a perverse gratification in his own determined and aggravating stupidity. On the other hand, Mr. Vyvian, in the good old-fashioned way, as he would have termed it, soon began to try what severity would do. He was determined to break the boy's spirit, he said. But that was already broken; and the haughty contempt with which Bertie held himself aloof from all companionship, and bore the frequent insults and injuries he received in return, from his schoolfellows, could not altogether hide his bitter anguish.

But the human heart must have something to

love, and Bertie's, although a proud heart and a soured heart, was human. He loved his mother and his sisters. He dreamed of them by night, and thought of them by day; and the weekly letters he received from the place they called their home, how were they treasured up, and read and re-read till he knew them all by heart!

But, besides these dear ones at home, Bertie had a place in his heart for the love of something nearer at hand. Had there been an ill-treated animal-a poor sickly bird, or a mangy dog, for instance-within his reach, he would have bestowed on it both friendship and protection. But neither dog nor bird came in his way. He found a friend, nevertheless.

The "Academic Institution"--though commercialism was its strong point-was classical also. To Bertie, however, this was a term of no signification; for, at the command of the partners, his studies were to be confined to the commercial department. The boy had wasted too much time already, Mr. C. said, on Latin and Greek: and this was another ingredient in poor Bertie's mortification and degradation.

One day, after school-hours, as Bertie sat moodily at his desk, turning over, for the twentieth time, the precious letters he had received since he had been at "that hateful school," he heard suppressed sobs from another part of the school-room, and, looking, saw that they proceeded from a lad of his own age, probably, who was helplessly turning over the pages of a Latin dictionary, by the side of which lay a dirty, creased, and dog's-eared schoolbook in the same tongue. At first, a smile of derision played on his lips, and he turned to his letters again. The sobbing continued. "Perhaps the booby has a mother that loves him," thought Bertie; and he put his letters aside, and, going up to the weeping boy, looked over his shoulder.

"Go away, will you; I don't want you here," exclaimed the boy, when he caught, over his shoulder, a glimpse of the intruder.

"I shall go when it pleases me," replied young Grafton, angrily, "and not before. But come," he added, in a milder_tone, "what is the matter, Freeman? Perhaps I can help you."

"You!" said the boy, contemptuously; "you!"— even that day, Freeman had seen Bertie descending with rapidity to the bottom of a class, on a simple question in vulgar fractions-" you help me!"

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Perhaps I could," answered Bertie, coolly; "but if you don't want any help, 'tis no matter."

"Yes, but I do want help; and it does matter; and if you can- -Oh! I shall have such a caning if-if-I don't do this to-night; and I-Ican't."

Bertie sat down beside his schoolfellow, and unravelled the mystery of an irregular verb. Free man was in ecstasies. "I didn't think you knew anything about these stupid things," he said; "all the boys laugh at you."

'Very likely," said Bertie, bitterly. "Let them laugh.'

"But I won't; and I'll be your friend, Grafton, if you will let me; only you are so-so-' 66 So what ?"