The next Sunday, Brandon was again on the wall with a prodigious plum-cake. A regular cut-and-come-again affair: it fell to the ground with a heaviness of sound that beat the falling of Corporal Trim's hat all to ribbons. To be sure, the corporal's fell as if there had been a quantity of "clay kneaded in the crown of it," whilst mine was kneaded with excellent dough. The Sunday after, there was the same appearance, varied with gingerbread, and then--for years, I neither saw, nor heard of him. Poor Joseph was threatened with the constable, and was put to no more expense for cakes for his foster-son. CHAPTER THIRTEEN. PRAY REMEMBER THE FIFTH OF NOVEMBER--RUMOURS OF WARS--PRECEDED BY SCHOLASTIC ELOCUTION, AND SUCCEEDED BY A COLD DINNER, DARKNESS, AND DETERMINATION. I shall now draw the dolorous recital of what I have termed my epoch of despondency to a close. The fifth of November was approaching; I had been at school nearly two years, and had learned little but the hard lesson "to bear," and that I had well studied. I had, as yet, made no friends. Boys are very tyrannical and very generous by fits. They will bully and oppress the outcast of a school, because it is the fashion to bully and oppress him--but they will equally magnify their hero, and are sensitively alive to admiration of feats of daring and wild exploit. With them, bravery is the first virtue, generosity the second. They crouch under the strong for protection, and they court the lavish from self-interest. In all this they differ from men in nothing but that they act more undisguisedly. Well, the fifth of November was fast approaching, on which I was to commence the enthusiastic epoch of my schoolboy existence. I was now twelve years of age. Almost insensible to bodily pain by frequent magisterial and social thrashings, tall, strong of my age, reckless, and fearless. The scene of my first exploit was to be amidst the excitement of a "barring out," but of such a "barring out" that the memory of it remains in the vicinity in which it took place to this day. I have before said that the school contained never less than two hundred and fifty pupils--sometimes it amounted to nearly three hundred. At the time of which I am about to speak, it was very full, containing, among others, many young men. The times are no more when persons of nineteen and twenty suffered themselves to be horsed, and took their one and two dozen with edification and humility. At this age we now cultivate moustaches, talk of our Joe Mantons, send a friend to demand an explanation, and all that sort of thing. Oh! times are much improved! However, at that period, the birch was no visionary terror. Infliction or expulsion was the alternative! and as the form of government was a despotism--like all despotisms--it was subject, at intervals, to great convulsions. I am going to describe the greatest under the reign of Root the First.