was driven quickly away, far into the rural distance, so fondly speculated on, of that favorite country road.
OUR YOUNG MASTERS.
Breaking-up day has come in hundreds of schools all over England, and boys have descended upon their happy parents and their peaceful homes. This has always been a serious event in the life of a household, and if we are not mistaken, it is likely to grow in importance. Boys used to be boys, and nothing else; that is to say, boisterous, mischievous beings, full of fun and frolic, but with a little consciousness that youth was not everything, and with a longing and ambition to quit school, and to be men. All this is changed. Some parent who has not made the discovery for himself previously, (will make it before the holidays are over, as he witnesses the inroads of young life, and watches the pleasant, unconscious air with which the boys enter and take possession; the frankness with which, as Hood says, "they push us from our forms," or take the last magazine, or occupy the billiard-room or the bath-room during the favorite hours, and appropriate the conversation during the intermediate period. Many a parent will feel very small before he sorrowfully parts with his youngsters. The fact is that we have come to a state of things in which adults must be content to "fag" for the boys. It is the fate of age, and must be submitted to. As soon as the fatal trunks are dumped down at the door, and the juveniles' caps are hung up in the hall, we know our doom, and must resign ourselves to an abridged estate, if we would not be execrated by all right-thinking people as heartless old fogies. "The boys have come," and everybody else is henceforth a tenant-at-will in his own house. Business, pleasures, engagements, all must give way for a time to the young tyrants of our homes.
There is no need to be cynical or unfair, or to try to make out that lads are a whit worse at bottom than they were; perhaps they are, in many respects, better. There are many extenuating circumstances connected with the form — the mild form — of domestic slavery of which we speak. Boys, it must be owned, impose no harsh and degrading conditions on their elderly victims. They are, on the whole, indulgent masters. They like to see their grown-up relatives happy and content. They ask no more than that their subjects should be obedient, and give them their attention and the results of their labor; and most of the worst sides of this tyranny will, we must say, compare favorably with the best aspects of slavery as seen in other lands. The "governor" is accorded a nominal precedence, in accordance with traditional usages or prejudices. No lad thinks of disputing his right to control his cheque-book, if his monopoly of his favorite armchair is a little in danger. He is treated by every well-disposed lad with the respect due to a bishop in partibus, or a colonial prelate; and it is only in regard to some trivial matters that he is taught to feel that, in the view of the young generation, "the child is father to the man" in a sense which Wordsworth scarcely contemplated. The lads treat their sisters, too, with chivalry, of course, and if they will listen to school chit-chat by the hour, and if they will not obtrude their own slightly silly and irrelevant interests on the patient, long-suffering, but still human Tom or Harry, they will be voted delightful companions. In fact, it must be said of “our masters" that they are considerate to every member of the household, from the head of the family to puss coiled on the hearth-rug. They insist only that every one shall bear in mind that "the boys are come," and that they are not to be lightly interfered with if on wet days they keep sliding down the banisters, against the orders of the former, or pull and pinch the tail of the latter in a vacant minute, or persist in saddling and mounting the lame pony, against the remonstrances and entreaties of the groom. We doubt much whether one household in England will have cause to murmur during the holidays, if only the lads get their own way, and if their elders do not keep thinking and talking about their own stupid affairs.
But we must not defend youth through thick and thin. There is one peculiarity of the gentle tyranny now so cheerfully acquiesced in by every true and tenderhearted parent, which, we venture to assert, has never been approached in any species of servitude hitherto known. Boys usurp the entire conversation, they peremptorily determine what it shall be. As far as we know, no tyranny has ever imposed this condition on its helots. The Romans may, by indirect means, have virtually imposed the Latin tongue on some of their conquered provinces, but it is not averred in history that they sternly regulated the subjects of private discourse among the
