There was no word of less than five syllables there, and a good many of them went up to eleven. These I picked out, to learn first, with my thumbnail, after counting upon all ten fingers; and then I fell back on the decasyllabic branches of wisdom, and got my sixteen. But, before putting anything down in ink--which my father would have had to pay for, unless he went down to the County Court--I found in my mouth a little bit of the stuff (a twisted, brittle, filmy stuff it is), which may be the nerve of the quill for aught I know; and it saved me most happily from knowing what its name is. For it got very easily into my throat,--so widely was that poor throat agape, at the prospect of all those tremendous words--and I put the feather-end in, to try to pull it out; and then I began to chew the harl; and who ever did that, without improving what he was going to write at first? Those gentlemen still were as eager as ever, that I should be shut up and done with; while I became unable to share their hurry, and desirous to see the case clearly. "If you please, sir," I said, from the bottom of the table, after getting on a stool to be heard all up it; "the meaning of this paper is, that I am going to learn all this, for nothing." Mr. Crankhead stared at the men of science, and with one accord they stared at him; and they would have been amused at my mistake, if it had not been too serious. "Upmore, you have a great deal yet to learn;" the Principal spoke severely; "do you imagine that Science has ever imparted her blessings, for nothing?" "I am sure, I did not know, sir," I replied; "but you said that all these were essential parts of true education; and old Rum says--Dr. Rumbelow, I mean,--in this paper, that all those are included in the money for the term." "But we have changed all that, my boy. Our ideas of what education is are entirely different from those of the obsolete system, under which you have been trained hitherto." "Then if you please, sir, my father ought to have had a new paper sent him, before he sent me back to school; or how can he tell what he is to pay? I am sure, that he won't pay a farthing more than he had to pay last quarter." "Thomas Upmore, you may go;" the new Principal said, quite loftily, after whispering, and receiving whispers; "you need not return to the schoolroom at all, or to any part of these premises, except where your clothes and books are. You are too benighted, and contumacious, to deserve any higher education; such as you expect to get for nothing. Branker, see that this boy does not communicate with the other boys. Pack all his things up, and put him in a cab." Thus was I discharged, very rudely as I thought, from the poor old _Partheneion_, now entitled the _Epistemonicon_; and I could not help crying at the manner of it, because people would say that I had been expelled.