The next object of attention was the table. Fisher had been at school, at one or two different schools, resembling each other in one thing only--the scandalous--I must use the strong and offensive word--the scandalous neglect or worse than neglect--the infamous and base calculations upon the subject of food which pervaded the system of those schools, and which pervaded, I am sorry to say, so many of the schools with which he had chanced to be acquainted. In the course of his practice as a medical man, his opportunities for observation had been above the common. In fine ladies' schools, I can not assert that the shameful economy of buying inferior provisions, and the shameful indifference as to how they were cooked, which prevail in so many boys' schools, were to be found--but a fault almost equally great prevailed too generally. There was not _enough_. These growing girls, stimulated to most unnatural exertions both of body and mind, peculiarly unnatural to growing girls who require so much care, fresh air, exercise, and rest, for their due development--these young things had very rarely nearly so much to eat as they could have eaten. Sometimes enough was literally not set before them; at others, a sort of fashion in the school to consider a good appetite as a proof of coarseness, greediness, and vulgarity, worked but too effectually upon these sensitive creatures. A girl at that age would rather be starved than ridiculed or sneered at for eating. But in boys' schools--expensive boys' schools too--where six times as much was paid for a boy's board as would have boarded him--either through scandalous parsimony, or the most inexcusable negligence, he had seen meat brought into the house not fit to eat; cheap and bad in itself, but rendered doubly unwholesome in summer by the most utter carelessness as to whether it was fresh. Boys are hardy things, and it is right they should not be accustomed to be too nice; but wholesome, plain roast and boiled is what they pay for and ought to have; and the defrauding them of what is so necessary to health, vigor, and even intellect, in this unprincipled manner, is almost the very worst form of robbery any man can be guilty of.