back-yard on boiling days. 'Spose it was this fancy made 'em call 'ee Crazy Middleton at Cambridge, hey? What was it, boy ?”

"Indeed, sir, I know not; nor did I ever trouble my head to inquire; but if the life led by my fellow collegians were that of rational beings, then am I proud to be called a madman. I could not make the University a sink of abomination, and a mere mockery of the high and holy purposes for which it was instituted. I could not drink, nor game, nor hunt, nor associate with loose women, nor drive a tandem, nor make a jest of religion, as an excuse for a compulsory observance of its outward forms. To such society I preferred solitude; for such occupations I substituted experimental chemistry, books, and above all, the study of the Bible. In short, sir, I was an unsociable and eccentric being, an enthusiast, a madman. Such may I ever be! O pleasant banks of Cam! O silent and sequestered shades! whither I have so often retired with my pencil and my book, to read, to meditate, and to compose-never, never shall

I forget the delight with which ye filled my bosom, when I escaped from the uncongenial haunts of men whom I could not esteem, and threw myself into those silent solitudes which are ever rendered eloquent, instructive, and endearing, by the voice, the wisdom, and the maternal tenderness, of Nature !"

"Bounce! there 'ee go; up in the clouds again, flying off at a tangent. Meant to have talked to 'ee rationally, 'bout business; but see thee 'st not in the humour for it now; time for all things-mustn't swim against the grain, nor rub against the tide. Well, Mounseer, what 'ee want, hey?" Dupin, who had entered while his master was speaking, announced that tea was ready: Gale availed himself of the opportunity for making his escape, and the Baronet, who never drank slops of any sort, remained in the dining-room until he had finished his second bottle of port, and looked over all the papers relative to the Arethusa's cargo, which had been placed before him by his nephew.

Leaving the son to amuse himself in the

study and little laboratory which he had fitted up at the top of the house, to the great annoyance of Lady Middleton, and to which he seized every opportunity of retreating, even from the society of his own family, we will enter into a few explanations, which may serve to account for his alternations of silent dejection or splenetic complaint, with bursts of passionate though misplaced enthusiasm, which might otherwise appear somewhat anomalous and contradictory.

Mild and amiable, loving and confiding, Gale Middleton had been sent at an early age to a public school, where his gentle and sanguine spirit had received a shock, which, turning all the sweet currents of his soul into bitterness, and rudely dissipating the bright visions of his boyhood, had injured his mental vision, and occasioned him to view the whole surface of life through a dark and distorted medium. This revulsion, which could have been effected only in a delicate and sensitive mind, had been mainly produced by the atrocious system of fagging, as it is termed, or making one boy

a slave to another-a degrading and demoralising practice, disgraceful to every scholastic institution where it is still suffered to prevail. Instead of finding friends and playfellows, as his affectionate heart had anticipated, he encountered only foes and oppressors. His boymaster, punishing the innocent for the guilty, wreaked a revenge upon his young victim for the cruelties that he had himself endured in his servile days; exercising so wanton and capricious a tyranny that it was sometimes impossible to understand his orders, and yet visiting their misapprehension or disobedience with instant and remorseless chastisement. If it be the self-entailed curse of oppression, whatever form it may assume, that it brutalises both the tyrant and his slave, to what chances of vitiation must that youth be exposed who has stood in both these predicaments, at an age when the evil passions are most easily developed, and when the heart receives those impressions which are generally the most indelible?

The misery and maltreatment he had expe

rienced, which would have hardened a tougher mind into callousness and cruelty, had rendered him melancholy, without injuring his temper or impairing the benevolence of his heart, although, when he turned inwards and sought for support in his own resources, he was stigmatized as shy and unsociable. His father, soon discovering that he was unhappy, removed him from school, and placed him with a tutor who had been recommended to him, giving him for a companion his cousin Caleb Ball, for whose education Sir Matthew had kindly undertaken to provide. Unfortunately for Gale, the tutor thus selected to form and frame his ductile mind, was a rigid, gloomy, fanatical predestinarian, who by impressing upon him the total depravity of mankind, with the exception of the elected few, and the inevitable perdition and torment to which the great mass of human creatures must be eternally condemned, turned even the sweet fountains of religious peace into bitterness and woe, and fostered that morbid dejection which a kinder-hearted man and a sounder Christian would have endeavour