Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV. Three years at school under the ancient system of education y with an account of Robin's rival, the heroic Dicky Dare, and thf war of the feds and Demies. In the meanwhile, I accommodated myself to the change with surprising readiness; and, as I grew older, I assumed the deportment and gradually took upon me all the airs of a rich man's son, bearing my honors and the favors of my protectors with as much grace as if I had been born to them; and this presumption, as it was indicative of a gentlemanly spirit, and had the good fortune to be backed by a gentlemanly little body—for I was grown, as everybody said, quite a pretty little fellow—served the purpose of endearing me still further to my pseudo parents, who suffered me to fume and pout, to swell and strut, to play the impertinent and tyrant, and indulge all the other humors of a spoiled child, yield- big to them with as much dutiful submissiveness as if they had been my parents in reality. And, certainly, so long as my good patroness lived—which, unhappily, was not long, for she died suddenly of an affection of the heart, in but little more than a year after her son—even Tommy himself had not been more effectually humored to the top of his bent. But, however bravely I bore it in my patron's house, there was one place where my pretensions were not so readily submitted to; that is, at school, in which the only way to obtain supremacy, I found, was to fight for it and drub down all opposition. As I have represented the associates of my boyhood in no very amiable colors, as being neither Cupids nor cherubs, such as the poets delight to picture them, it may be supposed my delineations were meant to apply to my schoolmates especially, which is very true, only that the picture was then only half drawn, being a s...