Seven o’clock in the morning; but there are more governesses, and governesses out of bed, than Miss Grissel and her companions in woe, in the mansions of the nobility. Doctor Wackerbarth’s young gentlemen, from Towellem House, New Road, are gone to bathe at Peerless Pool, under escort of the writing-master. The Misses Gimps’ establishment for young ladies, at Bayswater, is already in full activity; and the eight and thirty boarders (among whom there are at present, and have been for the last ten years, two, and positively only two, vacancies. N.B.—The daughters of gentlemen only are received)—the eight and thirty boarders, in curl papers and brown Holland pinafores, are floundering through sloughs of despond in the endeavour to convey, in the English language, the fact that Calypso was unable to console herself for the departure of Ulysses; and into the French vernacular, the information that, in order to be disabused respecting the phantoms of hope and the whisperings of fancy, it is desirable to listen to the history of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia. In Charterhouse and Merchant Taylors’ and St. Paul’s, the boys are already at their lessons, and the cruel anger of Juno towards Æneas, together with the shameful conduct of Clytemnestra to Agamemnon, are matters of public (though unwilling) discussion; some private conversations going on surreptitiously, meanwhile, touching the price of alleytaws as compared with agates, and the relative merits of almond-rock and candied horehound. After all, the poor have their privileges—their immunities; and the couch of the rich is not altogether a bed of roses. Polly Rabbets, the charity girl, lies snugly in bed, while the honourable Clementina St. Maur is standing in the stocks, or is having her knuckles rapped for speaking English instead of French. Polly has a run in the Dials before breakfast, an expedition to buy a red herring for father, and perchance a penny for disbursement at the apple-stall. She is not wanted at school till nine. The most noble the Marquis of Millefleurs, aged ten, at Eton, has to rise at six; he is fag to Tom Tucker, the army clothier’s son. He has to clean his master’s boots, fry bacon, and toast bread for his breakfast. If he doesn’t know his lesson in school, the most noble the Marquis of Millefleurs is liable to be birched; but no such danger menaces Jemmy Allbones at the National, or Tommy Grimes at the Ragged School. If the schoolmaster were to beat them, their parents would have the _plagosus Orbilius_ up at the police-court in a trice, and the Sunday newspapers would be full of details of the “atrocious cruelty of a schoolmaster.”