A public school is a petty world within itself--a wheel within a wheel--in so far as it is entirely occupied with its own concerns, affords its peculiar catalogue of virtues and vices, its own cares, pleasures, regrets, anticipations, and disappointments--in fact, a Lilliputian facsimile of the great one. By grown men, nothing is more common than the assertion that childhood is a perfect Elysium; but it is a false supposition that school-days are those of unalloyed carelessness and enjoyment. It seems to be a great deal too much overlooked, that "little things are great to little men;" and perhaps the mind of boyhood is more active in its conceptions--more alive to the impulses of pleasure and pain--in other words, has a more extended scope of sensations, than during any other portion of our existence. Its days are not those of lack-occupation; they are full of stir, animation, and activity, for it is then we are in training for after life; and, when the hours of school restraint glide slowly over, "like wounded snakes," the clock, that chimes to liberty, sends forth the blood with a livelier flow; and pleasure thus derives a double zest from the bridle that duty has imposed, joy being generally measured according to the difficulty of its attainment. What delight in life have we ever experienced more exquisite than that, which flowed at once in upon us from the teacher's "_bene_, _bene_," our own self-approbation, and release from the tasks of the day?--the green fields around us wherein to ramble, the stream beside us wherein to angle, the world of games and pastimes, "before us where to choose." Words are inadequate to express the thrill of transport, with which, on the rush from the school-house door, the hat is waved in air, and the shout sent forth! Then what a variety of amusements succeed each other. Every month has its favourite ones. The sports-man does not more keenly scrutinize his kalendar for the commencement of the trouting, grouse shooting, or hare-hunting season, than the younker for the time of flying kites, bowling at cricket, football, spinning peg-tops, and playing at marbles. Pleasure is the focus, which it is the common aim to approximate; and the mass is guided by a sort of unpremeditated social compact, which draws them out of doors as soon as meals are discussed, with a sincere thirst of amusement, as certainly as rooks congregate in spring to discuss the propriety of building nests, or swallows in autumn to deliberate in conclave on the expediency of emigration.