0 David Copperfield

CHAPTER 16

I AM A NEW BOY IN MORE

SENSES THAN ONE

N

ext morning, after breakfast, I entered on school life

again. I went, accompanied by Mr. Wickfield, to the

scene of my future studies - a grave building in a courtyard,

with a learned air about it that seemed very well suited to the

stray rooks and jackdaws who came down from the Cathe-

dral towers to walk with a clerkly bearing on the grass-plot

• and was introduced to my new master, Doctor Strong.
  Doctor Strong looked almost as rusty, to my thinking, as
  the tall iron rails and gates outside the house; and almost
  as stiff and heavy as the great stone urns that flanked them,
  and were set up, on the top of the red-brick wall, at regu-
  lar distances all round the court, like sublimated skittles,
  for Time to play at. He was in his library (I mean Doctor
  Strong was), with his clothes not particularly well brushed,
  and his hair not particularly well combed; his knee-smalls
  unbraced; his long black gaiters unbuttoned; and his shoes
  yawning like two caverns on the hearth-rug. Turning upon
  me a lustreless eye, that reminded me of a long-forgotten