explanation of the affair. About a mile and a half from Greenhay stood some horse barracks, occupied usually by an entire regiment of cavalry. A large dog--one of a multitude that haunted the barracks--had for some days manifested an increasing sullenness, snapping occasionally at dogs and horses, but finally at men. Upon this, he had been tied up; but in some way he had this morning liberated himself: two troop horses he had immediately bitten; and had made attacks upon several of the men, who fortunately parried these attacks by means of the pitchforks standing ready to their hands. On this evidence, coupled with the knowledge of his previous illness, he was summarily condemned as mad; and the general pursuit commenced, which brought all parties (hunters and game) sweeping so wildly past the quiet grounds of Greenhay. The sequel of the affair was this: none of the carabineers succeeded in getting a shot at the dog; in consequence of which, the chase lasted for 17 miles nominally; but, allowing for all the doublings and headings back of the dog, by computation for about 24; and finally, in a state of utter exhaustion, he was run into and killed, somewhere in Cheshire. Of the two horses whom he had bitten, both treated alike, one died in a state of furious hydrophobia some two months later, but the other (though the more seriously wounded of the two) manifested no symptoms whatever of constitutional derangement. And thus it happened that for me this general event of separation from my eldest brother, and the particular morning on which it occurred, were each for itself separately and equally memorable. Freedom won, and death escaped, almost in the same hour,--freedom from a yoke of such secret and fretful annoyance as none could measure but myself, and death probably through the fiercest of torments,--these double cases of deliverance, so sudden and so _unlooked for_, signalized by what heraldically might have been described as a two-headed memorial, the establishment of an _epoch_ in my life. Not only was the chapter of INFANCY thus solemnly finished forever, and the record closed, but--which cannot often happen--the chapter was closed pompously and conspicuously by what the early printers through the 15th and 16th centuries would have called a bright and illuminated colophon. FOOTNOTES [1] "_Peculiar_."--Viz., as _endowed_ foundations to which those resort who are rich and pay, and those also who, being poor, cannot pay, or cannot pay so much. This most honorable distinction amongst the services of England from ancient times to the interests of education--a service absolutely unapproached by any one nation of Christendom--is amongst the foremost cases of that remarkable class which make England, whilst often the most aristocratic, yet also, for many noble purposes, the most democratic of lands.