RISEN BY PERSEVERANCE. 



none of us much looked after ; and I soon learned to bring 

 books of amusement to the school with me, which, amid the 

 Babel confusion of the place, I contrived to read undetected. 

 Some of them, save in the language in which they were 

 written, were identical with the books proper to the place. 

 I remember perusing by stealth in this way Dryden's Virgil, 

 and the Ovid of Dryden and his friends ; while Ovid's own 

 Ovid and Virgil's own Virgil lay beside me, sealed up in the 

 fine old tongue, which I was thus throwing away my only 

 chance of acquiring. 



* 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 ascer- 

 tained, 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. Rad- 

 cliffe'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 abiUty of 



