Chapter II: His Education

On arriving at years of indiscretion, our hero began to display a
tendency to "seven-up," Old Sledge, and other card-inal virtues,
calculated to fit him for playing his cards right in future years.
Just about this time, too, his parents resolved to send him to
school, and it is as the young scholar we must now regard him.

Behold him, then, at his tasks, in a red shirt amputated at the
neck, and two yellow patches (the badge of Sardinia) flaming from
the background of his seat of learning. He readily mastered the
Greek verbs and roots, comprehended liquorice root, studied
geography, etymology, sycorax, and mahogany; could decline to
conjugate the verb toby, and quickly knew enough about algebra to
prove that X plus Y, _not_ being equal to Z, is _minus_ any dinner
at noon, and _plus_ one of the tightest applications of birch that
ever produced the illusion of a red-hot stove in immediate contact
with the human body.