at Farnham, and he first ran away from Farnham to
be a gardener. He was employed as a boy in the castle grounds, and there
he met a man who was a gardener at Kew. They talked, and the
eleven-year-old boy was fired to see for himself what gardening could
be. Next day he started off, with sixpence-halfpenny in his pocket, and
walked all day till he came to Richmond. There he should have had
supper; he had threepence left to get it with. But threepence was
exactly the price of a little book, _The Tale of a Tub_, which he spied
in a bookseller's window. He bought it, took it into a field near Kew
Gardens, and sat down to read; read on till it was dark, tumbled to
sleep under a haystack, and woke to ask the head gardener for work. He
was given work, but the gardener persuaded him to return home. Ten years
later he ran away from Farnham again, and for the last time. He was out
on the road to meet some friends on the way to Guildford Fair; the
London coach swung by, he swung up behind, and by nine that night was in
London with half-a-crown in his pocket. He left London for a soldier,
and his Farnham boyhood was over.

Riding by Farnham forty years after, Cobbett showed his son the spot
where he received his education. It was easily come by, but he was of
opinion that if he had not had it, "if I had been brought up a milksop,
with a nurserymaid everlastingly at my heels, I should have been this
day as great a fool, as inefficient a mortal, as any of those frivolous
idiots that are turned out from Winchester and Westminster School, or
from any of those dens of dunces called Colleges and Universities." The
spot is a sandy bank above the Bourne, a little stream, dry in summer,
which runs a mile south of Farnham, from Holt Forest to the Wey. This is
the education, described in _Rural Rides_:--

"There is a little hop-garden in which I used to work when from
eight to ten years old; from which I have scores of times run to
follow the hounds, leaving the hoe to do the best that it could to
destroy the weeds; but the most interesting thing was a _sand-hill_,
which goes from a part of the heath down to the rivulet. As a due
mixture of pleasure with toil, I, with two brothers, used
occasionally to _disport_ ourselves, as the lawyers call it, at this
sand-hill. Our diversion was this: we used to go to the top of the
hill, which was steeper than the roof of a house; one used to draw
his arms out of