the ugliness for which I was bantered at home, caused me also to be treated with greater harshness for my faults at school. Nor was it my enforced stupidity alone that thus gave the sting to my plainness, but my poverty. My father was very badly off. I wore my elder brothers’ old clothes, which were too large for me. I assumed, I recollect, on one occasion one of their cast-off hats, and it overshadowed me completely. My well-dressed school-fellows christened me Guy Fawkes on account of my frumpish attire: and one of them, kinder than the rest, came to me one day when I was all alone, and told me he was sorry for me. This last incident completed my humiliation. I did not weep but I kept very silent for a day or two. I entered into no sports. I walked apart and thought of my ugliness, my stupidity, my poverty; nor was it till a week or more had passed away that I regained my usual spirits. Shortly after the above-mentioned events, when I was about fourteen years of age, my poor father began to think seriously of the future career of his ugly bantling. And now a fresh sorrow awaited me. My acquirements were so small, my manners and appearance so unprepossessing, that there was great difficulty in deciding on my future course. “Come here, Jack,” said my father one day to me. “Can you read well?” “No,” he answered for me. “Can you write well?” “No,” he said again. “Can you cast accounts well?” “No,” he replied once more. “You can do nothing well, but take birds’ nests. I don’t know at all what is to become of you.” On hearing these words, poor Jack left the room very much crestfallen; and quite agreed with his father, that he did not at all know what was to become of him, being both the ugliest and stupidest of his family. “Send him to college, father, and make a clergyman of him,” suggested an amiable and compassionate sister, thinking more of her brother’s feelings than the Church’s interests. This last speech of hers I overheard, as I was disappearing through the doorway, with the additional words: “Perhaps he may just pass through, without being absolutely plucked.” * * * * *