should write a pathetic letter to the _Standard_, and that other parents should join in, for a fortnight, explaining to the English public that the manhood of the country is being destroyed in its early years, and the boys at school will read the letters aloud with much unction, and declare that "Pater has warmed up old Skinny properly," while their mother sends them generous remittances that they may obtain nourishing food to supplement their starvation rations. This money will be spent rapidly, but also shrewdly, at the "tuck-shop," where some old servant of the school is making a small fortune in providing for the boys such meat as their souls love, and for a fortnight Tom and his friends, for he is not a fellow to see his chums die before his eyes, will live on the fat of the land, which, upon the whole, means cocoa, sardines, sausages, and eggs. Seminary boys had their meals at home, and were very soundly fed with porridge and milk in the morning, followed by tea and ham, if their conduct had been passably decent. Scots broth and meat for dinner, with an occasional pudding, and a tea in the evening which began with something solid and ended with jam, made fair rations, and, although such things may very likely be done now, when we are all screaming about our rights, no boy of the middle Victorian period wrote to the _Muirtown Advertiser_ complaining of the home scale of diet. Yet, being boys, neither could they be satisfied with the ordinary and civilised means of living, but required certain extra delicacies to help them through the day. It was not often that a Seminary lad had a shilling in his pocket, and once only had gold been seen--when Dr. Manley paid Speug a medical fee for his advice in Bulldog's sickness--but there were few in the Seminary who were not able to rattle some pennies together, and, in the end, every penny found its way to the till of that comprehensive merchant and remarkable woman, Mrs. McWhae. Her shop and the other old houses beside it have been pulled down long ago, to make room for a handsome block of buildings, and I think her exact site is occupied by the plate-glass windows and gorgeous display of the "Breadalbane Emporium," where you can buy everything from a frying pan to a drawing-room suite, but where you cannot get a certain delicacy called "gundy," which Mrs. McWhae alone could make as it ought to be made, and at the remembrance thereof the very teeth begin to water. Mrs. McWhae did not sell books nor clothes, nor any other effeminate luxury of life, but she kept in stock everything that was really necessary to the life of a well-living and high-minded boy. There he could obtain marbles from the common clay, six for a halfpenny, on to the finer "streakies," six for a penny, till you came to large marbles with a red and blue pattern on a white ground, which were a halfpenny each, and climbed to "glassies" at a penny each; and there was one glass leviathian which