RALPH RECEIVES AN INFUSION OF PATRIOTISM--IS HIMSELF DRILLED AND DRILLS
A TOUCH HOLE--HE TURNS OUT A MONSTROUS BIG LIAR--SOMEBODY COMES TO SEE
HIM WHOM NOBODY CAN SEE, AND THE MYSTERY ENDS IN ANOTHER MIGRATION.
It is the nature of men and boys to run into extremes. I have carried
the reader with me through my desponding and enthusiastic epochs. I now
come to the most miserable of all, my mendacious one. An avowed poet is
entitled, _de jure_, to a good latitude of fiction; but I abused this
privilege most woefully. I became a confirmed and intrepid liar--and
this, too, was the natural course of my education, or the want of it. I
began to read all manner of romances. There was a military and
chivalrous spirit strong in the school--the mania for volunteering was
general, and our numerous school were almost all trained to arms. The
government itself supplied us with a half-dozen drill sergeants to
complete us in our manual and platoon exercises. We had a very pretty
uniform, and our equipments as infantry were complete in all things,
save and excepting that all the muskets of the junior boys had no
touch-holes. Mine was delivered to me in this innocent state. Oh! that
was a great mortification on field-days, when we were allowed to
incorporate with the --- and --- Volunteers, whilst all the big lads
actually fired off real powder, in line with real men, to be obliged to
snap a wooden flint against a sparkless hammer. A mortification I could
not, would not, endure.
There was a regular contention between Mr Root, my musket, and myself;
and at last, by giving my sergeant a shilling, I conquered. Every day
that our muskets were examined on parade, mine would be found with a
touch-hole drilled in it; as certainly as it was found, so certainly was
I hoisted. In that fever of patriotism, I, of all the school, though
denied powder and shot, was the only one that bled for my country.
However, I at length had the supreme felicity of blowing powder in the
face of vacancy, in high defiance of Buonaparte and his assembled
legions on the coast of Boulogne. Thus I had military ardour added to
my other ardencies. Moreover, I had learned to swim in the New River,
and, altogether, began to fancy myself a hero.
I began now to appreciate and to avail myself of the mystery of my
birth. I did not read romances and novels for nothing. So I began my
mendacious career. Oh! the improbable and the impossible lies that I
told, and that were retold, and all believed. I was a prince incognito;
my father had coined money--and I gave my deluded listeners glimpses at
pocket-pieces as proof; if I was doubted I fought. The elder boys shook
their heads, and could make nothing of it. The ushers made what
inquiries they dared, and found nothing which they could contradict
positively, but much upon which to found conjecture.
Still, notwithstanding my success, my life began to grow burthensome.
The lies became too manifold, too palpable, and, to me, too onerous.
They had been extremely inconsistent--ridicule began to raise her
hissing head. Shame became my constant companion--yet I lied on. I
think I may safely say, that I would, at the time that I was giving
myself out as a future king, have scorned the least violation of the
truth, to have saved myself from the most bitter punishment, or to
injure, in the least, my worst enemy; my lies were only those of a most
inordinate vanity, begun in order to make a grand impression of myself,
and persevered in through obstinacy and pride. But I was crushed
beneath the stupendous magnificence of my own creations. I had been so
circumstantial--described palaces, reviews, battles, my own charges, and
now--oh! how sick all these fabrications made me! It was time I left
the school, or that life left me, for it had become intolerable. And
yet this state of misery, the misery of the convicted, yet obstinately
persevering liar, lasted nearly a year. Let me hurry over it; but, at
the same time, let me hold it up as a picture to youth, upon the same
principle as the Spartans showed drunken slaves to their children.
Could the young but conceive a tithe of the misery I endured, they would
never after swerve from the truth.
I have not time to expatiate on several droll mishaps that occurred to
Mr Root; how he was once bumped in all the glowing panoply of equine
war; how, when one night, with his head well powdered, he crept upon
all-fours, as was his wont, into one of the boys' bedrooms, to listen to
their nightly conversations; and how such visit being expected, as his
head lay on the side of the bedstead, it was there immovably fixed, by
the application of a half-pound of warm cobbler's wax, and release could
only be obtained by the Jason-like operation of shearing the fleecy
locks. We must rapidly pass on. I was eager to get away from this
school, and my desire was accomplished in the following very singular
manner:--
One fine sunshiny Sunday morning, as we were all arranged in goodly
fashion, two by two, round the play-ground, preparatory to issuing
through the house to go to church, the unusual cry was heard of "Master
Rattlin wanted," which was always understood to be the joyful signal
that some parent or friend had arrived as a visitor. I was immediately
hurried into the house, a whispering took place between Mr and Mrs
Root, and the consequence was, that I was bustled up into the bedroom,
and my second-best clothes, which I then had on, were changed for the
best, and, with a supererogatory dab with a wet towel over my face, I
was brought down, and, my little heart playing like a pair of castanets
against my ribs, I was delivered into the tender keeping of the
pedagogue.
Having taken me by the hand, whilst he was practising all the amenities
with his countenance, he opened the parlour-door, where the
supposititious visitor was expected to be found, and lo! the room was
empty. Mrs Root and the servants were summoned, and they all
positively declared, and were willing to swear to the fact, that a
gentleman had gone into the room, who had never gone out. It was a
front parlour, on the ground-floor, and from the window he could not
have emerged, as the area intervened between that and the foot pavement;
and to see a gentleman scrambling through by that orifice into the
principal street of, and from one of the principal houses of the town,
whilst all the people were going to church, was a little too
preposterous even for Mr Root's matter-of-fact imagination. However,
they all peeped up the chimney one after the other, as if an elderly,
military-looking gentleman, encumbered with a surtout, for thus he was
described, would have been so generous as to save my schoolmaster a
shilling, by bustling up his chimney, and bringing down the soot. The
person was not to be found; Root began to grow alarmed--a constable was
sent for, and the house was searched from the attics to the cellar. The
dwelling was not, however, robbed, nor any of its inmates murdered,
notwithstanding the absconder could not be found.
Now, Mr Root was a wise man in his own generation, yet was he,
notwithstanding, a great fool. He was one of that class who can
sometimes overreach a neighbour, yet, in doing so, inevitably loses his
own balance, and tumbles into the mire. A sagacious ninny, who had an
"_I told you so_," for every possible event after it had happened.
Instead of taking the common-sense view of the affair of the missed
gentleman, and supposing that the footman had been bribed to let him
quietly out at the street-door, who, perhaps, had found his feelings too
little under his control to go through the interview with me that he
sought, Root set about making a miracle of the matter. It was
astounding--nay, superhuman! It boded some misfortune to him; and so it
really did, by the manner in which he treated it. I verily believe,
that had the servants or Mrs Root, who had seen the gentleman, averred
to a cloven foot as peeping out from his military surtout, he would have
given the assertion not only unlimited credence, but unlimited
circulation also. However, as it was, he made himself most egregiously
busy; there was his brother church-wardens and the curates summoned to
assist him in a court of inquiry; evidence was taken in form, and a sort
of _proces verbal_ drawn out and duly attested. Mr Root was a
miracle-monger, and gloried in being able to make himself the hero of
his own miracles.
Well, after he had solaced himself by going about to all his neighbours
with this surprising paper in hand, for about the space of a fortnight,
he thought to put the climax to his policy and his vainglory, by taking
it and himself up to the banker's in town, where he always got the full
amount of his bills for my board and education paid without either
examination or hesitation. The worthy money-changer looked grimly
polite at the long and wonderful account of the schoolmaster, received a
copy of the account of the mysterious visitor with most emphatic
silence, and then bowed the communicant out of his private room with all
imaginable etiquette.
Mr Root came home on excellent terms with himself; he imposed silence
upon his good lady, his attentive masters and ushers, and then wiping
the perspiration from his brow, proceeded to tell his admiring audience
of his great, his very great exertions, and how manfully through the
whole awful business he had done his duty. Alas! he soon found to his
cost that he had done something more. In cockney language, he had done
himself out of a good pupil. A fortnight after, I was again "wanted."
There was a glass coach at the door. A very reserved sort of gentleman
alighted, paid all demands up to the end of the ensuing half-year,
answered no questions, but merely producing a document, handed me and
all my worldly wealth into his vehicle, and off we drove.
To the best of my recollection, all the conversation that I heard from
this taciturn person, was that sentence, so much the more remarkable for
verity than originality, "Ask no questions, and I shall tell you no
stories." Having nothing else to do in this my enforced _tete-a-tete_,
I began to conjecture what next was to become of me. At first, I built
no castles in the air; I had got quite sick of doing that aloud with my
late school-fellows, and passing them all off as facts. Still, it must
be confessed that my feelings were altogether pleasurable. It was a
soul-cheering relief to have escaped from out of that vast labyrinth of
lies that I had planted around me, and no longer to dread the
rod-bearing Root; even novelty, under whatever form it may present
itself, is always grateful to the young.
In the midst of these agitations I again found myself in town; and I
began to hope that I should once more see my foster-parents. I began to
rally up my "little Latin and less Greek," in order to surprise the
worthy sawyer and his wife; and I had fully determined to work out for
him what the amount of his daily wages came to in a week, first by
simple arithmetic, secondly by fractions, thirdly by decimals, and
fourthly by duodecimals; and then to prove the whole correct by an
algebraical equation. But all these triumphs of learning were not
destined for me. I found, at length, that the glass coach drove up the
inn-yard of some large coachmaster; but few words were said, and I was
consigned to the coachman of one of the country stages, with as little
remorse and as little ceremony as if I had been an ugly blear-eyed pug,
forwarded in a basket, labelled "this side uppermost," to an old maiden
aunt, or a superannuated grandmother.
This was certainly unhandsome treatment to one who had been lately
seriously telling his companions that he was a disguised prince of the
blood, forced, for state reasons, to keep a strict incognito. It is
true, that I travelled with four horses, and was attended by a guard;
nay, that a flourish of music preceded my arrival at various points of
my journey; but all these little less than royal honours I shared with a
plebeian butcher, a wheezing and attenuated plumber and glazier, and
other of his lieges, all very useful, but hardly deemed ornamental
members of the body politic.