One morning, having the master's English rendering of the day's task well fixed in my memory, and no book of amusement to read, I began gossiping with my nearest class-fellow, a very tall boy, who ultimately shot up into a lad of six feet four, and who on most occasions sat beside me, as lowest in the form save one. I told him about the tall Wallace and his exploits; and so effectually succeeded in awakening his curiosity, that I had to communicate to him, from beginning to end, every adventure recorded by the blind minstrel. My story-telling vocation once fairly ascertained, there was, I found, no stopping in my course. I had to tell all the stories I ever heard or read; all my father's adventures, so far as I knew them, and all my Uncle Sandy's,--with the story of Gulliver, and Philip Quarll, and Robinson Crusoe,--of Sinbad, and Ulysses, and Mrs. Radcliffe's heroine Emily, with, of course, the love-passages left out; and at length, after weeks and months of narrative, I found my available stock of acquired fact and fiction fairly exhausted. The demand on the part of my class-fellows was, however, as great and urgent as ever; and, setting myself, in the extremity of the case, to try my ability of original production, I began to dole out to them by the hour and the diet, long extempore biographies, which proved wonderfully popular and successful. My heroes were usually warriors like Wallace, and voyagers like Gulliver, and dwellers in desolate islands like Robinson Crusoe; and they had not unfrequently to seek shelter in huge deserted castles, abounding in trap-doors and secret passages, like that of Udolpho. And finally, after much destruction of giants and wild beasts, and frightful encounters with magicians and savages, they almost invariably succeeded in disentombing hidden treasures to an enormous amount, or in laying open gold mines, and then passed a luxurious old age, like that of Sinbad the Sailor, at peace with all mankind, in the midst of confectionery and fruits. The master had a tolerably correct notion of what was going on in the "heavy class;"--the stretched-out necks, and the heads clustered together, always told their own special story when I was engaged in telling mine; but, without hating the child, he spared the rod, and simply did what he sometimes allowed himself to do--bestowed a nickname upon me. I was the _Sennachie_, he said; and as the Sennachie I might have been known so long as I remained under his charge, had it not been that, priding himself upon his Gaelic, he used to bestow upon the word the full Celtic pronunciation, which, agreeing but ill with the Teutonic mouths of my school-fellows, militated against its use; and so the name failed to take. With all my carelessness, I continued to be a sort of favourite with the master; and, when at the general English lesson, he used to address to me little quiet speeches, vouchsafed to no other pupil, indicative of a certain literary ground