When I was a boy—dear me, what a long time ago it seems!—I was a boarder at Upton House, Dr. Lickemwell’s school. It was a good school, and Dr. Lickemwell was a very good sort of man, and we were on the whole very happy there. I didn’t think so then, but I think so now, and I dare say you boys will think as kindly of your old schools and masters when you come to be men. You don’t believe what your parents tell you, that your school days will be the happiest time of your life, but it is true all the same, as you will find out some day. We were a very decent set of fellows at Dr. Lickemwell’s. None of your prim young gentlemen, who always have clean collars on, and go out walking two by two, like the picture of the beasts going into Noah’s ark. And none of your young swells that I see now-a-days swaggering to school with canes and kid gloves. No; we were nearly all real, honest school-boys, fond of play, and not very fond of lessons, but obliged to do them all the same; occasionally given to idleness and mischief, but not at all above taking our canings, as a matter of course, when we were found out. Though we were happy enough at school, you may be sure we were not at all sorry when the holidays came round. Like most boys, we used to think weeks before of the joyful journey home, and the bright blaze of our own firesides, and our father’s cheery welcome, and our sisters’ kisses, and our mother’s smiles—and jam cupboards. The Doctor kept us to our work in a way which made us relish thoroughly the pleasures of idleness for a few weeks, and the comforts and luxuries of home seemed doubly pleasant after the dusty, noisy school-rooms, and the bread and scrape, and Mrs. Lickemwell’s puddings, in which (though she was an excellent woman in other respects) a strict regard for truth compels me to say that there was a great deal of suet and very few plums. But let me not seem ungrateful. The puddings might not be adapted to our taste, but, while we could get nothing better, we adapted our taste to the puddings, and enjoyed them thoroughly at the time, with only an occasional looking back to the flesh pots of the home kitchen, and a regretful remembrance of the glories of mamma’s Christmas plum pudding. To such a plum pudding, among other delights, was I looking forward one cold, snowy December. The holidays were drawing near, lessons were growing doubly stupid and tedious, the days were passing slowly by. But we lived on hope, and exercised our arithmetical talents in counting the days that had yet to pass by before _the_ day, a course of study which we liked better than compound proportion, but which did not please our master at all, seeing that it obliged him to do more caning in the last fortnight of the half than in a month at any other time.