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No. 105]

OR

Monthly Journal of Fashion.

SHEEP-DOG.

A SKETCH FROM LIFE.

LONDON, SEPTEMBER 1, 1839.

By the Author of 'Jerningham.'

"He had worth, Poor fellow!-but a humorist in his wayAlas! what drove him mad." SHELLEY.

I shall never forget poor White. He was the junior classical master at Dr. R- -'s when I was a school-boy, and we honored him with the soubriquet of "Sheep-dog."

Undoubtedly the originator of this nick-name was an individual of no ordinary intelligence. "The Sheep-dog!" How striking is the application of the term; he who applied it was certainly a poet with a fine sense of metaphorical fitness. Now exists there, in the multitudinous ranks of things animate and inanimate, an object, sentient, or insensate, more fit than this as the type symbolical of an usher? "The Sheep-dog!" How finely it expresses the whipper-in to a pack of school-boys. The master is the shepherd, the usher the sheep-dog, and the congregation of school-boys is the flock.

I am not sure that this most poetical of nick-names did not originate in the bearer of it himself. I have a dim, flickering notion that the title was self-assumed. At all events poor White acknowledged the fitness of its application; and, as though he were impressed with an idea that the common duties of his calling did not sufficiently assimilate him to the guardian animal whose name he bore, he would at times, for he was of a playful disposition, assume the nature as well as the office of his canine prototype, running and barking after his flock as though in verity he had once been a sheep-dog, and that the metempsychosis had been imperfectly accomplished. I think that the fine qualities of his mind, delighting, like Mr. Square's, in "the fitness of things," caused him to rejoice, if not in his sobriquet, in the abstract beauty of its application. If they had called him anything else it would have fretted him; but to be called a sheep-dog-an antelope is more beautiful, a lion more noble, a swan more graceful than a sheep-dog; but to have called him an antelope, a lion, or a swan, would have been a lucus a non lucendo, a very pointed piece of irony indeed. The sheep-dog is ungainly in person as in manners: the roughest of its kind; but this mattered very little to White. Had he been a lawyer, a sailor, or an apothecary, the application of this nick-name would have maddened him--but as he was an usher in a school, he saw no reason why he should not be called "Sheep-dog." It pleased him to think that in his own humble person he strikingly exemplified the "fitness of things."

Poor White! If I were to live a thousand years—a millenium crowded with incident-I do not think that I should ever forget him. We used to say that he had once been a post-boy, which was not otherwise true, than that his parents had kept the post-office in Exeter, or in some other west

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of England town. He came to Dr. Ryoung man, with a truly Shakspearian knowledge of the classics, he had "small Latin and less Greek;" but be had a mine of pure gold within him, not less precious because it was uncoined. The little that he knew was self-taught; he had received no other than the commonest education, but he had the will and the power to learn; he had the germs of knowledge; he aspired nobly; and, putting forth his strength, he grappled with his past ignorance until, in a few months, the neglect and the idleness of his many boyish years was atoned for by the day-and-night labours of his intellect, now vigorous in its maturity. How beautiful and how grand is the triumph of native power over the antagonisms of circumstances, and yet how little was it appreciated, nay, how scorned it was in White, the "Sheep dog."

I do not think that there was a boy in the school who saw anything to admire in White; indeed, it was the fashion to despise him. Breathing a conventional atmosphere as we did, with all the self-inflation of peurile aristocrats, we tossed up our heads at the unfortunate "sheep-dog," and having voted that he was no gentleman, we tacitly agreed to victimize him. There was nothing actually ridiculous in the man, but we soon made him appear ridiculous. How we did this will be speedily divined by all who have ever been to school. Oh! numerous were the up-settings of his desk, always contrived so as to deluge its contents with ink, the supplementary pins and cobbler's-wax appended to his seat, the gratuitous insertions of many strange articles in the magazine of his coat-pockets, the caricatures and the doggrel verses concerning him written in all the likeliest places, the sucked oranges which would salute him on the face and be apologized for as intended for some one else; all these, and many more inflictions of a like nature, was he fated to endure. Not that he was unpopular, for he was neither cruel nor exacting; had he been so we should not have dared to treat him thus; but that he was ridiculous, at least we thought him so, and, like the frog pelters in the fable, it was fine fun to us although it was death to poor White.

Where the yoke has galled the hard-working animal there the flies are sure to settle. So it was with us; for as we knew that White was poor, we took pleasure in the destruction of his property. I think that in most boys there is a leven of inherent cruelty; but our conduct in this respect far exceeds the common fly-killing barbarity of juvenile tortures. Knowing that he was very poor, and that he was strenuously endeavouring to cultivate his mind, almost with one consent we agreed to destroy his property, and to interrupt his studies whenever it was in our power to do So. We thought that he was stingy and a sap; we did not like him to economize nor to study out of school-hours; the other masters did neither the one thing nor the other; the senior classical usher was in debt, and we thought him an uncommon fine fellow, for he subscribed half-a-guinea to the cricket-fund, whereas White only doled out half-acrown. And then he was "never dressed like a gentleman,"

we criticised his clothes most unmercifully, and declared that they were cut out with a spade; the head-usher wore Wellington boots, but White contented himself with those hybrid creations, which we call high-lows, and we used always to declare that they must have been made by Vulcan, for they were shapeless, iron-clouted things, and had the property of enduring for ever. Then again--and this was made a serious charge against him-White drank neither coffee nor tea; but consoled himself morning and evening with a doubtful beverage of a brown muddy aspect, which looked like a concoction of tobacco-juice and saw dust, and tasted--for sometimes poor White would present a portion of his second cup as a peace-offering to one of his tormentors-like a distillation of burnt crusts, and in those days we did not think it unpalatable; at all events, it was much better than our own sky-blue, and we were glad enough to partake ourselves of this mystic preparation, although we heartily despised White for drinking it in the place of a more approved beverage. We were great sticklers for legitimacy in those days, even in the article of coffee and tea.

But at length the great secret was discovered; a cylindrical tin case was found by one of the boys, and a label pasted thereupon betrayed the mysterious nature of the "Sheep-dog's" secession from established drinks. And the strange stuff, which, in its dilution, washed down White's daily meals; the dark, muddy, illegitimate compound, which so much offended our patrician sensibilities, was simply Hunt's Roasted Corn.

Now this we thought a most unheard-of prophanation, a wicked turning away from established rectitude, and poor White suffered accordingly. To patronize a radical, and to drink roasted corn! It was plain that White must have been a seditious person, a leveller, a dissenter, a freethinker, an enemy to the order of things-and who could say that he was not actually an atheist ?

We never forgave White for saving his money and his time. He had time enough and money enough to be a better fellow, and as he had neither wife nor children we could not see any occasion for his husbandry. But still the "sheep dog," disregarding popular opinion, "bore up and steered right onward." He was patient under affliction, and in action persevering; the conscience supporting him throughout all. He seldom complained, he was generally cheerful, and he played with the little boys at times as though he were quite infantine himself. He had apparently very good health, and he was neither pale nor cattenuated from study, and this was mainly because he adopted the plan of taking exercise at the same time that he studied. Up and down the play-ground he would walk rapidly with a book in his hand, committing whole pages of Greek primitives to memory; and then after a time, he would call a little boy to his side and say, "Hear me these." Then the usher and the pupil would change places, but White seldom missed a word, for he was endowed with extraordinary powers of memory, which seldom or never played him false. The lesson over, the sheep-dog would thrust his book into the capacious pockets of his green plaid robe du matin, and crying out "Catch me if you can;" he would run about the play-ground like mad, shouting and making grimaces as he went, to the no small diversion of the beholders.

At length a whisper ran through the school that poor White was actually mad. I was then one of the elder boys,

and I had long ago ceased from tormenting him. Indeed, I had begun by this time to respect him, for I had heard something about a widowed mother and a maiden sister, supported out of White's savings, and willingly accrediting the truth of this, admiration took the place of scorn in my young and compliant breast, and White became to mea hero. Somebody told me that White was mad, and I answered, "No more mad than you are."

But I watched him, and it was very evident that though not actually mad, he was strange and flighty at times; he looked oddly, he said odd things, and when he was out in the playing fields he would drive his squad of little boys before him like a flock of sheep, barking all the way as he ran. He had studied too much; and, although there was little to apprehend, the boys were not wrong in saying that he was "cracked," slightly, very slightly, as I thought.Studious men, in their hours of recreations, are often the most singular; philosophers jump over chairs and play divers antics to divert themselves, and White was only thus wildly exuberant, when he disported himself, that he might shake off entirely the oppressiveness which results from an over-exertion of the brain. I feel myself at this very moment, a desire to rush into the streets shouting; yet, if I were to do so, I should doubtless be taken for a madman. It was next given out in the school that White was about to leave us. I asked him, and he confirmed the truth of the report; he was going to college to a college in Wales, St. Mary's, I think-and the Bishop of had given him a promise of ordination. He had long desired to become a minister of the gospel, and for this, year after year, he had toiled with unremitting perseverance. "I have worked very hard for this," he said in a touching voice, which brought tears into my eyes-"and now do I think that I have heaped up money enough and knowledge enough to sustain me until I enter the haven towards which I have been steering so long."

It was now easy to account for the economy and the studiousness of the usher. That which had once been mysterious was now plain. That which had once been deemed ignominious was now looked upon as ennoblingthe reprehensible became the laudable, and poor White became the fashion. The upper boys were kind to him, and they thrashed the lower boys who insulted him, and the sheep-dog, for the last few months of his sojourn at Dr. R's, was suffered to drink his roasted corn in peace, and to learn his Greek primitives in quietness.

But still I discarded not my belief in the story of the widowed mother and the maiden sister, whom White's savings maintained. I clung to it, for if it were a delusion it was a beautiful one, and worthy to be cherished.

So White, the "sheep-dog," left us, and another took his place in the school-room-a stylish young fellow, of good family and bad morals-a very indifferent classic, but a most unexceptionable cricketter.

And nothing was heard of poor White, until one morning, about a year after his departure, a weary traveller, unwashed and unshaven, his clothes covered with dust, and his feet forcing their way through his shoes, presented himself at Dr. R- 's many-windowed mansion, and claimed to be immediately admitted. The servant who opened the door knew him not, and as her master was engaged she would have repulsed him, but the stranger was importunate; he said that he was wearied and foot-sore, that he had walked all the way from Exeter, and that now being hungry, athirst

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