notices as Cn, and whose intellect in riper years became clouded, had a more than usual look of being the son of old parents. He had a reputation among us, which, in more superstitious times, might have rendered him an object of dread. We thought he knew a good deal out of the pale of ordinary inquiries. He studied the weather and the stars, things which boys rarely trouble their heads with; and as I had an awe of thunder, which always brought a reverential shade on my mother's face, as if God had been speaking, I used to send to him on close summer days, to know if thunder was to be expected.

In connection with this mysterious schoolfellow, though he was the last person, in some respects, to be associated with him, I must mention a strange epidemic fear which occasionally prevailed among the boys respecting a personage whom they called the Fazzer.

The Fazzer was known to be nothing more than one of the boys themselves. In fact, he consisted of one of the most impudent of the bigger ones; but as it was his custom to

disguise his face, and as this aggravated the terror which made the little boys hide their own faces, his participation of our common human nature only increased the supernatural fearfulness of his pretensions. His office as Fazzer consisted in being audacious, unknown, and frightening the boys at night; sometimes by pulling them out of their beds; sometimes by simply fazzing their hair (“fazzing” meant pulling or vexing, like a goblin); sometimes (which was horriblest of all) by quietly giving us to understand, in some way or other, that the "Fazzer was out," that is to say, out of his own bed, and then being seen (by those who dared to look) sitting, or otherwise making his appearance, in his white shirt, motionless and dumb. It was a very good horror, of its kind. The Fazzer was our Dr. Faustus, our elf, our spectre, our Flibbertigibbet, who "put knives in our pillows and halters in our pews." He was Jones, it is true, or Smith; but he was also somebody else—an anomaly, a duality, Smith and sorcery united. My friend Charles Ollier should have written a book about him. He was our Old

Man of the Mountain, and yet a common boy.

One night I thought I saw this phenomenon under circumstances more than usually unearthly. It was a fine moonlight night; I was then in a ward the casements of which looked (as they still look) on the churchyard. My bed was under the second window from the east, not far from the statue of Edward the Sixth. Happening to wake in the middle of the night, and cast up my eyes, I saw, on a bed's head near me, and in one of these casements, a figure in its shirt, which I took for the Fazzer. The room was silent; the figure motionless; I fancied that half the boys in the ward were glancing at it, without daring to speak. It was poor C―n, gazing at that lunar orb, which might afterwards be supposed to have malignantly fascinated him.

Contemporary with C-n was Wood, before mentioned, whom I admired for his verses, and who was afterwards Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge, where I visited him, and found him, to my astonishment, a head shorter than myself. Every upper boy