But these speculations rather belong to the question of the comparative advantages of a public over a private education in general.

I must get back to my favorite school; and to that which took place when our old and good steward died.
[Footnote 1: Under the denomination of _gage_.] [Footnote 2: I am told that the late steward [Mr.Hathaway], who evinced on many occasions a most praiseworthy anxiety to promote the comfort of the boys, had occasion for all his address and perseverance to eradicate the first of these unfortunate prejudices, in which he at length happily succeeded, and thereby restored to one half of the animal nutrition of the school those honors which painful superstition and blind zeal had so long conspired to withhold from it.] And I will say that when I think of the frequent instances which I have met with in children, of a hard-heartedness, a callousness, and insensibility to the loss of relations, even of those who have begot and nourished them, I cannot but consider it as a proof of something in the peculiar conformation of that school, favorable to the expansion of the best feelings of our nature, that at the period which I am noticing, out of five hundred boys there was not a dry eye to be found among them, nor a heart that did not beat with genuine emotion.

Every impulse to play, until the funeral day was past, seemed suspended throughout the school; and the boys, lately so mirthful and sprightly, were seen pacing their cloisters alone, or in sad groups standing about, few of them without some token, such as their slender means could provide, a black riband or something, to denote respect and a sense of their loss.

The time itself was a time of anarchy, a time in which all authority (out of school hours) was abandoned.

The ordinary restraints were for those days superseded; and the gates, which at other times kept us in, were left without watchers.