In the mean time,--so generally unfortunate is the courtship of that bashful undertoned wooer, Modest Merit, to that loud, brazen masculine, worldly heiress, Success--the school did not prosper. The number of scholars diminished rather that increased. At least no new boys came--but one fine morning, about nine o’clock, a great “she gal,” of fifteen or sixteen, but so remarkably well grown that she might have been “any of our mothers,” made her unexpected appearance with bag and books. The sensation that she excited is not to be described! The apparition of a Governess, with a Proclamation of a Gynecocracy could not have been more astounding! Of course SHE instantly formed a class; and had any form SHE might prefer to herself:--the most of us being just old enough to resent what was considered as an affront on the corduroy sex, and just young enough to be beneath any gallantry to the silken one. The truth was, sub rosa, that there was a plan for translating us, and turning the unsuccessful Boys’ School into a Ladies’ Academy; to be conducted by the Dominie’s eldest daughter--but it had been thought prudent to be well on with the new set before being off with the old. A brief period only had elapsed, when, lo! a leash of female school _Fellows_--three sisters, like the Degrees of Comparison personified, Big, Bigger, and Biggest--made their unwelcome appearance, and threatened to push us from our stools. They were greeted, accordingly, with all the annoyances that juvenile malice could suggest. It is amusing, yet humiliating, to remember the nuisances the sex endured at the hands of those who were thereafter to honour the shadow of its shoe-tie--to groan, moan, sigh, and sicken for its smiles--to become poetical, prosaical, nonsensical, lack-a-daisical, and perhaps even melodramatical for its sake. Numberless were the desk-quakes, the ink-spouts, the book-bolts, the pea-showers, and other unregistered phenomena, which likened the studies of those four unlucky maidens to the “Pursuit of Knowledge under Difficulties,”--so that it glads me to reflect, that I was in a very small minority against the persecution; having already begun to read poetry, and even to write something which was egregiously mistaken for something of the same nature. The final result of the struggle in the academic nest--whether the hen-cuckoos succeeded in ousting the cock-sparrows, or vice versa--is beyond my record; seeing that I was just then removed from the scene of contest, to be introduced into that Universal School where, as in the preparatory ones, we have very unequal shares in the flogging, the fagging, the task-work, and the pocket-money; but the same breaking-up to expect, and the same eternity of happy holidays to hope for in the Grand Recess.