“Get up, my boy,” he said, “you’ll get no good lying there. There has nothing happened to you more than happens to new boys everywhere. Come, you’re not a baby to cry. Get up, and be a man.” “I want to go home,” said Nello. “I daresay you do; but you’re not going home. So your plan is to make the best of it,” said the schoolmaster. “Now come, I let you off yesterday; but I’ll send a man to take you out of bed if you don’t get up now. Come along, boy. I see you want to be a baby, as your uncle said.” “I am no baby,” cried Nello, furious; but the schoolmaster only laughed. “I give you half-an-hour,” he said; and in half-an-hour, indeed, Nello, giddy and weak, managed to struggle down to the schoolroom. His watch was no longer going. He had forgotten it in the misery of the past day; it lay there dead, as Nello felt--and his bird was flown. He stumbled downstairs, feeling as if he must fall at each step, and took his seat on the lowest bench. The lessons were not much, but Nello was not equal to them. The big figures about seemed to darken the very air to the boy--to darken it, and fill it up. He had no room to breathe. His hand shook, so that he could not write a copy, which seemed a simple matter enough. “Put him at the very bottom; he knows nothing,” Mr. Swan said to his assistant; and how this galled the poor little gentleman, to whom, in his feebleness, this was the only way left of proving a little superiority, what words could say? Poor little Nello! he cried over the copy, mingling his tears with the ink, and blurring the blurred page still more. He could not get the figures right in the simplest of sums. He was self-convicted of being not only the least, but the very last, the dunce of the school. When the others went out to play, he sat wretched in a corner of the wretched schoolroom, where there was no air to breathe. He had not energy enough to do anything or think of anything; and it was only the sight of another boy, seated at a desk writing a letter, which put it into his head that he too might find a way of appeal against this cruelty. He could not write anything but the largest of large hands. But he tore a leaf out of the copybook, and scrawled a few lines across it. “I am verrey meeserble,” he wrote; “Oh, Lily, ask Mary to kome and take me home.” “Will you put it into a cover for me?” he said to the boy who was writing, who proved to be the very head boy who reigned over Nello’s room. “Oh, please, put it into a cover. I’ll forgive you if you will,” cried Nello. The head boy looked at him with a grin.