Page:The life of Captain Sir Richard F. Burton (IA b21778401).pdf/43

Rh Richmond, the only excitement of the journey being the rage of the post-boys, when we boys on the box furtively poked their horses with long sticks. After sundry attempts at housing themselves in the tiny doll-rooms in the stuffy village, they at last found a house, so called by courtesy, in "Maids of Honour Row," between the river and the Green, a house with a strip of garden fronting it, which a sparrow could hop across in thirty seconds. Opening upon the same Green, stood that horror of horrors, the school, or the "Establishment," as it would now be called. It consisted of a large block of buildings (detached), lying between the Green and the Old Town, which has long been converted into dwelling-houses. In those days it had a kind of paling round a paddock, forming a long parallelogram, which enclosed some find old elm trees. One side was occupied by the house, and the other by the school-room. In the upper stories of the former, were the dormitories with their small white beds, giving the idea of the Lilliput Hospital; a kind of outhouse attached to the dwelling was the place where the boys fed at two long tables stretching the whole length of the room. The only decoration of the palings were names cut all over their inner surfaces and rectangular nails at the top, acting as chevaux de frise. The school-room was the usual scene of hacked and well-used benches and ink-stained desks, everything looking as mean and uncomfortable as possible.

This was the kind of Dotheboys Hall, to which, in those days, gentlemen were contented to send their songs, paying a hundred a year, besides "perquisites" (plunder): on the Continent the same treatment would be had for £20.

The Rev. Charles was a bluff and portly man, with dark hair and short whiskers, whose grand aquiline nose took a prodigious deal of snuff, and was not over active with the rod; but he was no more fit to be a schoolmaster than the Grand Cham of Tartary. He was, however, rather a favourite with the boys, and it was shrewdly whispered, that at time he returned from dining abroad half-seas over. His thin-lipped wife took charge of the ménage, and looked severely after the provisions, and swayed with an iron sceptre the maid-servants, who had charge of the smaller boys. The ushers were the usual consequential lot of those days. There was the handsome and dressy usher, a general favourite with the fair; the shabby and mild usher, despised by even the smallest boy; and the unfortunate French usher, whose life was a fair foretaste of Purgatory.

Instead of learning anything at this school, my brother and I lost much of what we knew, especially in French, and the principal acquisitions were, a certain facility of using our fists, and a general