Even in my sleep, the clumsy and grinning features of this tormenting imp haunted me like a spectre: my visions were nothing but chins and cricket-bats; walking-sticks, sustaining themselves upon human excrescences, and pokers dancing a hornpipe upon the tip of a nose.

I assure you that I have spent hours in secret seclusion, practising to rival my hated comrade, and my face--see how one vanity quarrels with another--was little better than a mass of bruises and discolorations.
I actually became so uncomfortable as to write home, and request to leave the school.

I was then about sixteen, and my indulgent father, in granting my desire, told me that I was too old and too advanced in my learning to go to any other academic establishment than the University.
The day before I left the school, I gave, as was usually the custom, a breakfast to all my friends; the circumstance of my tormentor's sharing my room obliged me to invite him among the rest.

However, I was in high spirits, and being a universal favourite with my schoolfellows, I succeeded in what was always to me an object of social ambition, and set the table in a roar; yet, when our festival was nearly expired, and I began to allude more particularly to my approaching departure, my vanity was far more gratified, for my feelings were far more touched, by observing the regret and receiving the good wishes of all my companions.
I still recall that hour as one of the proudest and happiest of my life; but it had its immediate reverse.

My evil demon put it into my tormentor's head to give me one last parting pang of jealousy.