some measure he has totally failed in his design, and that more often than he cares to own, he has overshot the mark.

Having endeavored to make the intention tolerably clear, the reader may now be able to get more enjoyment from this tale.

The tale aims to attack so-called “vagaries,” as well as great and contemptible follies. It attacks the frailties of the school-boy with as much gusto as it attacks the foibles of the romancer. In fact, from first to last, in almost every chapter, the writer rushes gallantly to attack something. Not satisfied with attempting to ridicule other people’s tales, he often indirectly, but not the less insultingly, attacks this one, as the careful reader will doubtless observe. This was begun in jest, perhaps; but it soon became a fixed purpose, carried out in earnest. Even a boy can generally see the drift of our narrative; but it is often hard for the writer himself to see its true meaning—harder still to appreciate it. Nevertheless, there is a good deal to be seen in the story; and doubtless there are[xii] some who will see more in it than was designed to be put there.

[xii]

Again, the story is not written to instruct studious and solemn boys, who mope about the house with grave biographies and heavy ancient histories in their hands, while without, the sun is shining bright, birds are warbling their extempore melodies in the fruit-trees, squirrels are frisking across the garden-walks, and all Nature is smiling. Such people are not boys; they are but figure-heads in creation, who, though they may, perhaps, find a place in so-called “literature,” will never find one in the history of nations. This story does not inform those who crave for knowledge, and yet more knowledge, that the elephant is a pachydermatous native of Asia and Africa, nor that the monkey is a quadrumanous animal, with prehensile tail, whose habitat is in tropical regions. Still, the attentive reader will, in all probability, gather from it that an ass brays, that a punt leaks, that a school-boy’s pets are mortal, and that gunpowder is liable to explode when fire is applied to it. It is not written as a guide and instructor to youth. Its heroes are deplorably depraved; they love to plot mischief. Yet a boy may possibly learn something from our work. He may learn that the boy who plays practical jokes on his school-fellows generally “gets the worst of it,” that he often suffers more than the intended victim. He may learn, also, that a boy’s wickedness brings its own punishment. (The writer takes great pains to correct the culprits—in fact, he never fails to do so after 

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