College! how different from school! Never believe a great, broad-faced, beetle-browed Spoon, when he tells you, with a sigh that would upset a schooner, that the happiest days of a man's life are those he spends at school. Does he forget the small bed-room occupied by eighteen boys, the pump you had to run to on Sunday mornings, when decency and the usher commanded you to wash? Is he oblivious of the blue chalk and water they flooded your bowels with at breakfast, and called it milk? Has he lost the remembrance of the Yorkshire pudding, vulgarly called choke-dog, of which you were obliged to eat a pound before you were allowed a slice of beef, and of which, if you swallowed half that quantity, you thought cooks and oxen mere works of supererogation, and totally useless on the face of the earth? Has the fool lost all recollection of the prayers in yon cold, wet, clay-floored cellar, proudly denominated the chapel? has he forgot the cuffs from the senior boys, the pinches from the second master? and, _in fine_, has he forgot the press at the end of the school-room, where a cart-load of birch was deposited at the beginning of every half year, and not a twig left to tickle a mouse with, long before the end of it? He talks of freedom from care--what a negative kind of happiness! Let him cut off his hand, he will never hurt his nails. Let him enclose an order for all his money even unto us, and no more will he be troubled with cares about the Stocks--no more will he be teased with calculations on the price of grain. All that raving about school-boys is perfect nonsense--it is the most miserable period of a human being's life. Poor, shivering, trembling, kicked, buffetted, thumped, and starved little mortals! We never see a large school but we feel inclined to shoot them all, masters, ushers, and door-keepers included, merely to put them out of pain.