e home and
educated, my father hearing my Latin and Greek as he smoked his pipe,
while my mother--a very superior woman, with a great taste for literature
and art--acted as teacher, while she was at work painting, after the
duties of housekeeping were over. I ought to have been a better boy.
But there were two great drawbacks--one, the absence of all emulation,
which too often means the loss of all worldly success; the other, the
painful and useless effort to be good.

CHAPTER IV.
VILLAGE SPORTS AND PASTIMES.

It was wonderful the utter stagnation of the village. The chapel was the
only centre of intellectual life; next to that was the alehouse, whither
some of the conscript fathers repaired to get a sight of the county
paper, to learn the state of the markets, and at times to drink more ale
than was good for them. About ten I had my first experience of death. I
had lost an aged grandmother, but I was young, and it made little
impression on me, except the funeral sermon--preached by my father to an
overflowing congregation--which still lives in my recollections of a dim
and distant past. I was a small boy. I was laid up with chilblains and
had to be carried into the chapel; and altogether the excitement of the
occasion was pleasing rather than the reverse. But the next who fell a
victim was a young girl--whom I thought beautiful--who was the daughter
of a miller who attended our chapel, and with whom I was on friendly
terms. On the day of her funeral her little brothers and sisters came to
our house to be out of the way. But I could not play with them, as I was
trying to realise the figure I thought so graceful lying in the grave--to
be eaten of worms, to turn to clay. But I shuddered as I thought of what
we so often say:

There are no acts of mercy past
In the cold grave to which we haste,
But darkness, death, and long despair
Reign in eternal silence there.

I was sick at heart--I am sick at heart now--as I recall the sad day,
though more than seventy years have rolled over my head since then.

I have spoken of the excitement of the Reform struggle. It was to most
of us a time of fear. A mob was coming from Yarmouth to attack Benacre
Hall, and then what would become of Sir Thomas "Guche"? But older heads
began to think that the nation would survive the blow, even if Benacre
Hall were burnt and Sir Thomas "Guche" had to hide his diminished head.
As it happened, we did lose Si