and resolution to fight his further battles, not with his own hands merely, but with the fists of his inferiors. He was determined to organize his adherents, who made up one half the school, into an army, of which he was to be General; and he desired me to do the same with mine; with which forces, after having disciplined them to our minds, we should fight our battles like true soldiers.

The notion was as agreeable to our adherents as to ourselves; and, in a very brief space, behold us, to wit, General Dicky Dare, and General Sy Tough, (for by that sobriquet my school-mates always preferred to distinguish me,) each at the head of his train-bands, all in Coventry uniform, tag, rag, and bobtail, with shingle-swords and broomstick-mus-' kets, banners of old paper-hangings, and full bands of music-for, in truth, every soul, the generals only excepted, was musician as well as soldier-in which old kettles and frying-pans contended with conches and tin-horns, and fifes and pitch-pipes with pennywhistles, jews-harps, and comb-organs. In such array, and all eager for the battle, we were wont to meet, of Saturday afternoons, on the school house green; and, having saluted each other with a preliminary shower or two of pebbles and potatoes, march gallantly up to the charge, and to it pell-mell like brave fellows; so that the plain of Troy and Donnybrook-fair were mere nothings in comparison. And such battles, fought with extreme rancour, and at an expense of numberless broken heads, and, once or twice, a broken bone, we never could give over, until the towns-people, who by no means encouraged such excesses, fell foul of us with switches and horsewhips, and so routed both armies together.

Such interference we deemed a great hardship, as the sport was in great vogue among us; and the more

particularly as we had dubbed our parties, respectively, Feds and Demies-that is, Federalists and Democrats-in imitation of the grown children, our fathers of the country at large, and thought we had as much right as they, under the above titles, to knock one another on the head. But the enemy, or the armed intervention, prevailed; switches and horsewhips were weapons we could not resist; and both armies, having been effectually routed half a dozen times, were finally disbanded, to the unspeakable grief of my great rival, General Dare; who mourned his discomfiture in sorrow and humiliation, but was too great of soul to despair. His spirit was, indeed, not to be vanquished by one rebuff; and his genius soon supplied, in a new undertaking, a nobler field of fame than that from which we had been driven.

VOL. I.-5

CHAPTER V.

The patriot Dare preaches the doctrine of schoolboys' rights, and the young Republicans strike for freedom.

THE seminary of which I have spoken under the disparaging name of school, enjoyed the nobler title of Academy, to which it had the better right, as its affairs were administered by Trustees, who never troubled their heads about it, and was intended to indoctrinate boys in all kinds of learning, from spelling in two syllables up to the Pons Asinorum and Hic-hæc-hoc. The only difficulty, as some esteemed it, was that the task of dispensing these multifarious subjects of education was made the duty of one single teacher, there being neither assistant nor usher in the school: but the duty was, after all, no great matter in a country where it is every man's business to be a jack of all trades, and capable of turning his hand to any thing.

The worthy person to whom was committed this weighty charge, I have not yet spoken of; nor do I now think it necessary to say any thing more of him than that his name was Burley, his nickname Old Bluff, and that he was a very good sort of person, who was so occupied in horsing and trouncing his scholars all day long, that he had little time left for any thing else, and in particular, none at all for directing their studies.

This latter circumstance, as we had the true schoolboy detestation of hard lessons, endeared him very greatly to our affections; though there was a good deal of grumbling on account of the trouncing; so that, to balance matters fairly, as he lost as much good will by one peculiarity as he gained by the other, he may be said to have occupied a very doubtful place in our regards. Unfortunately, however, he chose to side with the town's people in their opposition to the warlike pastime just mentioned, which he professed to consider a very outrageous irregularity, disreputable to the school and to him, its master, and calling for the severest measures to put it down. These measures involved, of course, a prodigious amount of flogging; of which, though all had their proportion, a principal share fell to the commanders in chief of the two armies-that is, to Dickey Dare and myself. The school had been ever a Babel: but it was now Pandemonium itself, nothing being heard from morning till night, but the thwacks of the birch and ferule, and the yells of infant innocence. Inexpressible were the terror, the confusion, the lamentation that prevailed; and broken spirits and broken hearts, and tingling palms and smarting backs, were the lot of all.

In this exigency, the genius of General Dare, whose soul only grew the bigger under oppression, and whose ambition took a higher flight for every ignominious elevation upon a schoolmate's back, devised an expedient, than which nothing could have been better contrived to obviate every difficulty, to free us from present pangs, and secure us from all future tyranny. Taking advantage of our assembling together, one morning after schoolalas, assembling no longer to fight or play, but to mourn our sufferings and invoke execrations on the

head of our tyrant-he invited us to follow him into a neighbouring grave-yard, (a favourite place of meeting, whenever we had any mischief to concoct;) where, mounting upon a grave stone-a proper rostrum for an occasion so solemn-doffing his hat with the graceful courtesy, and puckering up his visage with the zeal for the public good, of a veteran stumporator, he began to harangue us in the following

terms:

"I tell you what, boys and fellers," he cried, jumping in medias res with the directness of a Spartan, "there's no two words about the matter, and the long and short of it is, Old Bluff is the biggest old tyrant that ever was, and treats us like slaves and Guinea niggers; which is a thing quite unbearable and scandalous; because as how, this is a free land, and we are free people, as good as any body else; and it's agin all law and constitution for any body to treat any body like a slave, except the niggers; which is because the niggers is slaves, and not free people. Now I'll tell you what, by Julius Cæsar, I've been considering about school-keeping and flogging the boys; and I've just made it out, they ha'n't no right, no how, to do no such thing in America; because as how, we have n't no kings here, but Presidents, which is made by the people, and is the people's servants, and has n't no right to hang people, and cut off their heads and flog 'em; because how, they a'n't kings, but Presidents; and it's just the same thing with schoolmasters, for all of their cutting up like kings, for they a'n't kings, but only Presidents. Now, you see, this is a free land, and a republic, which is all freedom and equality; and the people is n't ruled over by nobody, like England, and Rome, and Greece, and them foreign parts; but they governs themselves; and when there's any