Castles in the Air - Paperback

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PETTICOAT GOVERNMENT. 7 Harassed by the perpetual recapitulation of my backslidings into fancying myself a victim, I began to meditate an elopement from Eagle House, according to the most approved rules of romance, for the chance of being picked up by a company of strolling players. Nay, I had even hankerings after an attempt at suicide, in a weedy fish-pond in our garden. It had been more than once hinted to me by my sisters that but for the necessity of laying by money out of the family income to purchase me a commission, their mother would manage to take them to town for a few weeks of the season; that it was a great pity I had out-grown the navy; that a brother of my mother, who resided in Barbadoes, had often expressed a wish to adopt some member of the family. And as I had now outgrown by many inches the tallest of my fellow-martyrs at Eagle House, so that in the cold winter nights it was difficult to inclose my longitude and latitude within limit of the exiguous bedstead calculated for the proportions of " young gentlemen from seven to fourteen years of age," I entertained serious fears that, as it was impossible to dwarf me into a schoolboy for life, the two girls might eventually prevail on my mother to sentence me to centipedes and Guava jelly, or bury me alive in some ignominious counting-house betwixt Lombard Street and St. Paul's. Every year of my life, in short, I learned to regret, with bitterer yearnings, that the late gallant Colonel Powerscourt had not survived the marrow and fatness of Bristol, to protect his only son against the tyrannies of female domination. To have been out-snubbed in my teens by the raillery of a couple of sisters is a fact that will naturally induce every public man, having been a public schoolboy, to denounce me as " a spoon." But ...