And indeed Uncle Jack played his cards so well on this occasion, and set before the Lord-Lieutenant, with whom he had a personal interview, so fine a prospectus, and so nice a calculation, that before my holidays were over, he was installed in a very handsome office in the county town, with private apartments over it, and a salary of £500 a-year--for advocating the cause of his distressed fellow-creatures, including noblemen, squires, yeomanry, farmers, and all yearly subscribers in the NEW PROPRIETARY AGRICULTURAL, ANTI-INNOVATING ----SHIRE WEEKLY GAZETTE. At the head of his newspaper Uncle Jack caused to be engraved a crown supported by a flail and a crook, with the motto "Pro rege et grege," and that was the way in which Uncle Jack printed his pats of butter. CHAPTER X. I seemed to myself to have made a leap in life when I returned to school. I no longer felt as a boy. Uncle Jack, out of his own purse, had presented me with my first pair of Wellington boots; my mother had been coaxed into allowing me a small tail to jackets hitherto tailless; my collars, which had been wont, spaniel-like, to flap and fall about my neck, now, terrier-wise, stood erect and rampant, encompassed with a circumvallation of whalebone, buckram, and black silk. I was, in truth, nearly seventeen, and I gave myself the airs of a man. Now be it observed, that that crisis in adolescent existence wherein we first pass from Master Sisty into Mr Pisistratus, or Pisistratus Caxton, Esq.--wherein we arrogate, and with tacit concession from our elders, the long envied title of "young man"--always seems a sudden and imprompt up-shooting and elevation. We do not mark the gradual preparations thereto; we remember only one distinct period in which all the signs and symptoms burst and effervesced together;--Wellington boots, tail, stiffener, down on the upper lip, thoughts on razors, reveries on young ladies, and a new kind of sense of poetry. I began now to read steadily, to understand what I did read, and to cast some anxious looks towards the future, with vague notions that I had a place to win in the world, and that nothing is to be won without perseverance and labour; and so I went on till I was seventeen, and at the head of the school, when I received the two letters I subjoin. 1.--FROM AUGUSTINE CAXTON, ESQ.