What I Remember, Volume 1

Then aside, in the well-known great rolling, mellow voice (I can hear it now):

“On Hurstley Down yesterday I was out with Jack Woodburn” (this was another minor canon of the cathedral, but not one of our chaplains)....

“My black bitch Juno put up a covey almost at our feet.”

“I blazed away with both barrels and brought down a brace.”

“But Jack fired too soon and never touched a feather.” And so on.

Now there would be no sort of interest in recording that we unfortunately chanced to have at one time a very graceless chaplain, if such had been the case, which it was not. The interest lies in the fact that the gentleman in question was a worthy and excellent man in all the relations of life; that he was absolutely innocent of intentional impropriety; and that, as far as I can remember, we had none of us the faintest idea that we ought to have been shocked or scandalised. Such was the state of things and men’s minds “sixty years since.”

The brother of this chaplain was the manciple of the college, and was known among us as “Damme Hopkins,” from the following circumstance. His manner was a quaint mixture of pomposity and bonhomie, which made a conversation with him a rather favourite amusement with some of us. Now the manciple was a very well-to-do man, and was rather fond of letting it be known that his independent circumstances made the emoluments of the place he held a matter of no importance to him. “Indeed,” he would say, “I spoke to the Bishop [the Warden] a few months ago of resigning, but the Bishop says to me, ‘No, no, Damme Hopkins, you must keep the place.’” And I have no doubt that the deficiency of dramatic instinct which thus led the worthy manciple to transfer his own phraseology to his right reverend interlocutor rendered him quite unconscious of any inaccuracy in his narration.

We used to go twice every Sunday, as I have said, to the cathedral. But we did not attend the whole morning service. We timed our arrival there so as to reach the cathedral at the beginning of the Communion service, and to be present at that and at the sermon which followed it. We had no sermons in college chapel, save on certain special occasions, such as 5th of November, “Founder’s commemoration,” or “Founder’s obit.” On the former of these occasions a sermon used to be preached with which we had become familiar by the annual repetition of it during a succession of years. I wonder how many there are left who will remember the words, “A letter was sent, couched in the most ambiguous terms, and who so likely to detect it as the King himself?”

At the cathedral a series of benches between the pulpit and Bishop’s throne and the altar were reserved for us, so that the preacher was immediately in front and to the right of us. The surplice was used in the cathedral pulpit at the morning service, the Geneva gown at that in the afternoon. At the former one of the prebendaries or the dean was the preacher, at the latter a minor canon.

I remember that we used to think a good deal of the dean’s sermons, and always attended to them—a compliment which was not often paid, to the best of my recollection, to the other preachers. Dean Rennell was a man of very superior abilities, but of great eccentricity, mainly due to extreme absence of mind. It used to be told of him that unless Mrs. Rennell took good care, he was tolerably certain, when he went up to his room to dress for a dinner-party, to go to bed. It will be understood from what has been said of the accommodation provided for us in the cathedral, that in order to face us, the preacher, addressing himself to the body of the congregation in the choir, must have turned himself round in the pulpit. And this Rennell would sometimes do, when he thought what he was saying especially calculated for our edification. He was, as I have already mentioned, a great Platonist, and when he alluded, as he not unfrequently did, to some doctrine or opinion of the Grecian philosopher, he would turn to us and say, in a sort of parenthetical aside, “Plato I mean.”

Among the stories that were current of Rennell I remember one to the effect that when upon one occasion he was posting from Winchester to London he stopped at Egham for luncheon. A huge round of boiled beef, nearly uncut, was placed upon the table. But the dean found it was, as he thought, far too much boiled; so without more ado he cut the huge mass into four quarters and helped himself to a morsel from the centre! The landlady, when the mutilated joint was carried out, was exceedingly indignant, and insisted that a guinea should be paid for the entirety of it. The dean, much against the grain, as the chronicle goes, paid his guinea, but packed up the four quarters of the round and carried them off with him.

Further indication of his eccentricity might be seen, as I remember, in his habit of wearing in the cathedral pulpit in cold weather, not a skull cap, but a flat square of velvet on his head, with which occasionally he would in the heat of his discourse wipe his face, then clap it on his head again.

The cathedral, as I have had occasion to mention in a former chapter, had been undergoing a very extensive restoration, one operation in the course of which had been the removal of the organ from over the screen; and the question whether it should be replaced there or be transferred to the north transept was very earnestly, and, it was said, somewhat hotly debated by the chapter. The dean was exceedingly vehement in supporting the latter course, which was eventually adopted, it can scarcely be doubted by those who see the church as it now is, with entire judiciousness.

I could, not without gratification to myself, chatter much more about reminiscences of the years I passed at Winchester. But I feel that the only excuse for having yielded to the temptation as far as I have must be sought in the illustrations afforded by what I have written of the large changes in habits, thoughts, customs, feelings that have been wrought in English society and English institutions by the lapse of some sixty years.

And now the time had come when I, having attained the age of eighteen, was superannuated at the election in the July of 1828. It was not at that time certain whether I should or should not succeed to a fellowship at New College, for that depended upon the number of vacancies that might occur in the year up to the election of 1829. Eventually I missed it by, as I remember, one only. One more journey of “Speedyman” before July, 1829, announcing the marriage or the death of a fellow of New College, or the acceptance of a college living by one of them, would have made me a fellow of New College. But “Speedyman” did not make his appearance.

I left Winchester a fairly good Latin scholar, and well grounded—I do not think I can say more—in Greek; and very ignorant indeed of all else. According to what I hear of the requirements at the present day, I had no scholarly knowledge whatever of my own language. I knew nothing whatsoever of Anglo-Saxon, or of mediæval English. I had never—have never, I may rather say—had any English grammar in my hand from my cradle to the present hour.

It is certain, however, that the enlarged requirements in this department, to which I have referred, have somehow or other failed to banish from the current literature of the day a vast number of solecisms, vulgarisms, and grammatical atrocities of all sorts, which defile the language to a much greater degree than was the case at the time of which I have been writing, and which would have been as abhorrent to me when I left Winchester as they are now.

Of arithmetic I knew nothing—I should write “know”—and of all that arithmetic should be the first step to, à fortiori, still less. In the art of writing I received the best possible instruction, for I was licked by my tutor and scourged by the masters if my writing was illegible. Of less indirect tuition I had none.

There was a writing master—one Mr. Bower, Fungy Bower he was called, why, I know not—who sat at a certain low desk in the school during; school hours. I never received from him, or saw any one else receive from him, any instruction in writing. Nor did he, to the best of my knowledge and belief, form any part of William of Wykeham’s foundation. The only purpose his presence in school appeared to serve was to mend pens and make up the weekly account of marks received by each boy which regulated his place in the class.

The register containing the account of these marks was called the “classicus paper,” and was kept in this wise. All the members of each “class”—or “form” as it is called in other schools—continually changed places while proceeding with the lesson before the master, each, if able to answer a question which those above him could not answer, passing up above them. And part of the punishment for failing altogether in any lesson, for being as the phrase was “crippled in Virgil,” or “crippled in Homer,” was to go to the bottom of the class. Thus the order in which the class sat was continually changed. And the first business every morning was for the two boys at the head of the class to take the “classicus paper,” and mark 1. against the name of the boy at the bottom, 2. against the next, and so on; so that the mark assigned to him at the head was equal to the number in the class. And this record of the marks was handed every week to Fungy Bower to be made up, so as to indicate the place in the class held by each member of it. But though this was done weekly the account was carried on during the whole half year, so that a boy’s final place in the class was the accurate result of his diligence and success during the whole “half.”

Of course I was a cricketer—we all were, and were indeed obliged to be, whether willingly or not, until we became prefects, when, of course, those only who loved the game continued to practise it. I never was a great cricketer, but have been “long stop” quite often enough to know how great is the nonsense talked by those of the present generation, who maintain that all the elaborate precautions against being hurt which are so abundantly taken by the players of these latter days are necessitated by the greater force of the bowling as now practised. In simple truth this is all bosh! though I can hardly expect a generation in cute curandâ plus æquo operata to believe a very old batter and fielder when he tells them so!

My favourite game was fives. We had a splendid fives court, and the game was played in a manner altogether peculiar to Winchester; now I believe—like so much else—abandoned. We used a very small ball, hardly bigger than a good-sized walnut, and as hard as if made of wood, called a “snack.” And this was driven against the wall by a bat of quite peculiar construction. It was made, I think, of ash, and there were only two men, rivals, who could make it. It was about a yard long, the handle round, and somewhat less than an inch in diameter. It then became gradually thinner and wider, till at about the distance of six inches from the extremity it was perhaps an inch and a half wide, and not thicker than half-a-crown. Then it expanded and thickened again into a head somewhat of the shape of an ace of spades, some three inches across and half an inch thick. The thin part was kept continually well oiled—in such sort that it became so elastic, that the heavy head might almost be doubled back so as to touch the part nearer the hand. It will be understood both that the difficulty of striking a bounding ball with this instrument was considerable, and that the momentum imparted to the small hard ball by the blow was very great indeed. It is true that accidents occasionally, though very rarely, happened from a misdirected blow. But it does not seem necessary that the old bat should be abandoned, for our judicious grandsons might play with great comfort and safety in helmets!

Of course I, like most of my contemporaries, left Winchester—and indeed subsequently left Oxford—as ignorant of any modern language, save English, as of Chinese! And as for music—though Oxford and Cambridge are the only universities in Europe which give degrees in music—it is hardly an exaggeration to say that, with very rare exceptions, to have taught an undergraduate, or a boy at a public school, music, would have been thought much on a par with teaching him to hem a pocket-handkerchief. And here the present generation has the pull to a degree which it perhaps hardly sufficiently recognises!

It was during my last year at Winchester that I made my first attempt at authorship. Old Robbins, the grey-headed bookseller of College Street, who had been the college bookseller for many years, had recently taken a younger partner of the name of Wheeler, and this gentleman established a monthly magazine, called the Hampshire and West of England Magazine, to which I contributed three or four articles on matters Wiccamical. I have the volume before me now—perhaps the only extant copy of that long since forgotten publication. The Rev. E. Poulter, one of the prebendaries of Winchester, who had a somewhat wider than local reputation as a wit in those days, was the anonymous contributor of a poetical prologue of such unconscionable proportions that poor Wheeler was sadly puzzled what to do with it. It was impossible to refuse or neglect a reverend prebendary’s contribution, besides that the verses, often doggerel, had some good fun in them. So they were all printed by instalments in successive numbers, despite the title of prologue which their author gives them.

CHAPTER VII.

I came back from Winchester for the last time after the election of 1828, to find a great change at home. My father, pressed more and more by pecuniary difficulties, had quitted Harrow, and established himself at Harrow Weald, a hamlet of the large parish in the direction of Pinner. He had not given up his farm at Harrow. He would have been only too glad to do so, for it involved an annual loss undeviatingly; but that he could not do, for his lease tied him to the stake. But he took another farm at Harrow Weald, on which there was an old farm-house, which had once been a very good one, and, living there, carried on both farms. How far this speculation was a wise one I have no means of judging. Doubtless he took the Harrow Weald farm upon very largely more advantageous terms than those which he had accepted from Lord Northwick for the farm at Harrow; but having been absent all the time at Winchester, I knew so little about the matter that I do not now know even who his Harrow Weald landlord was. Possibly I did know but have forgotten. But I think I remember to have heard my father say that the Harrow Weald farm did in some decree alleviate the loss sustained by the larger farm at Harrow, and that, could he have got rid of the latter, the Harrow Weald farm might have paid its way. The excellent house he had built at Harrow was in the meantime let to Mr. Cunningham, the vicar.

The change from it to the old farm-house at Harrow Weald, as a home, was not a pleasant one; but a very far worse and more important change awaited my home coming, in the absence of my mother. She had gone to America.

Where, or under what circumstances, my parents had first become acquainted with General La Fayette I do not know. I myself never saw him; but I know that it was during a visit to La Grange, his estate in France, that my mother first met Miss Frances Wright, one of two sisters, his wards. I believe she became acquainted with Camilla Wright, the sister, at the same time.

It is odd, considering the very close intimacy that took place between my mother and Frances Wright, that I never knew anything of the parentage and family of these ladies, or how they came to be wards of General La Fayette. But with Miss Frances Wright I did become subsequently well acquainted. She was in many respects a very remarkable personage. She was very handsome in a large and almost masculine style of beauty, with a most commanding presence, a superb figure, and stature fully masculine. Her features both in form and expression were really noble. There exists—still findable, I suppose, in some London fonds de magasin—a large lithographed portrait of her. She is represented standing, with her hand on the neck of a grey horse (the same old gig horse that had drawn my parents and myself over so many miles of Devonshire, Somersetshire, and Monmouthshire roads and cross roads—not that which so nearly made an end of us near Lynmouth, but his companion), and, if I remember rightly, in Turkish trousers.

But these particulars of her bodily form and presentment constituted the least remarkable specialties of her individuality. She was unquestionably a very clever woman. She wrote a slender octavo volume, entitled A Few Days in Athens, which was published by Longman. It was little more than a brochure, and it is many years since I have seen it, but the impression that it was very clever abides in my mind. I remember the fact that the whole edition was sold. And the mention of this book reminds me of a circumstance that seems to show that my parents must have become to a considerable degree intimate with these wards of General La Fayette at some period preceding the visit to La Grange, which exercised in the sequel so large an influence over my own, and my mother’s, and brothers’ future. This circumstance is that I recollect my father to have been in communication with the Longmans on behalf of Miss Wright in respect to her work.

Be this how it may, at the time of that visit to La Grange spoken of above, Miss Wright’s thoughts and aspirations were directed with a persistent and indomitable enthusiasm, which made the groundwork of her character, to doing something for the improvement of the condition of the slave populations in the southern states of the great transatlantic republic. Both Frances and Camilla Wright were ladies of considerable fortune; and I believe that General La Fayette wished much to induce his ward Frances not to employ her means in the scheme she was now bent on. But she was of age,—I fancy some six or seven years more than that—and he had no authority to interfere with her purpose, with which besides, otherwise than as likely to be pecuniarily disastrous to her, he entirely sympathised.

Her purpose was to purchase a property in the valley of the Mississippi—in Alabama I think it was—with the slaves upon it, to free them all immediately, and to cultivate the estate by their free labour, living there with them in a sort of community, the principles and plan of which were, I fancy, very largely based upon the ideas and schemes of Mr. Owen of Lanark. His son, Robert Dale Owen, subsequently well known in Europe as the author of sundry works on spiritualism and political speculations, and as United States Consul at Naples and perhaps other cities, was a life-long friend of Miss Wright’s.

Now, my parents had taken with them to La Grange my next brother, Henry, who has been mentioned as the companion of my early London rambles, and who was then rapidly approaching manhood without having found for himself, or having had found for him, any clear prospect of earning the livelihood which it was clearly enough necessary that he should earn in some way; and Miss Wright proposed to my mother to bring him to America to join in her projected establishment and experiment at “New Harmony”—such I believe to have been the name which Miss Wright gave to her property. The original name, I think, was Nashoba, but my knowledge of any of these matters is very imperfect. I know that the whole scheme ended in complete disappointment to all concerned, and entire failure. To Miss Wright it involved very considerable pecuniary loss, which, as I learned subsequently from my mother, she bore with the utmost fortitude and cheerfulness, but without any great access of wisdom as regarded her benevolent schemes for the political and economical improvement of human, and especially black, society. I never saw her again; but remember to have heard of her marrying a French teacher of languages at the close of a course of lectures given by her against the institution of matrimony. All that I heard from my mother and my brother of their connection with Miss Wright, of her administration of affairs at New Harmony, and her conduct when her experiment issued in failure and disappointment, left with me the impression of her genuinely highminded enthusiasm, her unselfishness, bravery, and generosity, but, at the same time, of her deficiency in the qualities which can alone make departure from the world’s beaten tracks—mill-horse tracks though they be—either wise, profitable, or safe. She had a fine and large intelligence, but not fine or large enough for going quite unpiloted across country.

Whether my mother resided any time at Nashoba I am not sure, but I think not. At all events, very shortly after her arrival in America she established herself at Cincinnati. And when it became evident that there was no prospect of permanent work for my brother in the business of regenerating the negroes, it was determined—by the advice of what Cincinnati friends I know not—that he should join my mother there, and undertake the establishment and conduct of an institution which, as far as I was able to understand the plan, was to combine the specialities of an Athenæum, a lecture hall, and a bazaar! And it was when this enterprise had been decided upon, but before any steps had been taken for the realising of it, that I accompanied my father on a visit to America.

When I returned from Winchester in July, there were still many months before me of uncertainty whether I might get a vacancy at New College or not, and my father, having determined on going for a short visit to Cincinnati, proposed to take me with him. After what I have written in a previous chapter of my early tastes and proclivities, I need hardly say that the prospect of this travel was in the highest degree delightful to me. I am afraid that, at the time, any call to New College, which should have had the effect of preventing it, would have been to me a very unwelcome one. Our departure was fixed for September, and the intervening time was spent by me in preparations for the great adventure, very much such as Livingstone may be supposed to have made on quitting England for the “dark continent.”

I was, as it seems to me now, still a very boyish boy, all ex-Wiccamical prefect as I was, and, I cannot help thinking, younger and more childish than the youngsters of equal age of the present generation.

The voyage, however, really was a bigger affair in those days than it has become in these times, for it was before the iron horse had been trained to cross the Atlantic. And my father made it a very much more serious business still by engaging for us berths in the steerage of a passenger ship. I hardly think that he would have done so had he been at all aware of what he was undertaking. It is true that he was undoubtedly hard pressed for money, though I have not now, and had not then any such knowledge of his affairs as to enable me to judge to what degree he was straitened. But there was also about my father a sort of Spartan contempt for comfort, and determination not to expend money on his own personal well-being, which was a prominent feature in his character, and which, I have no doubt, contributed to the formation of his resolution to make this journey in the least costly manner possible.

But, as I have said, I think that he had no very clear notion of what a steerage passage across the Atlantic implied. As for me, if he had proposed to make the voyage on a raft I should have jumped at the offer! It was, in truth, a sufficiently severe experience. But, as I was then at eighteen, I should have welcomed the chance of making such an expedition, even if I had accurately realised all the accompaniments and all the details of it.

We went on board the good ship Corinthian, Captain Chadwick, bound for New York, in the September of 1828. Ship and captain were American.

I confess that my first feeling on entering the place which was to be my habitation during the next few weeks was one of dismay. It was not that the accommodation was rough. I cared little enough about that, and should have cared as little had it been much rougher. But it was the first time in my life that I had had any experience of the truth of the proverb that misfortune makes one acquainted with strange bedfellows! Of course there was in that part of the vessel allotted to the steerage passengers no sort of enclosure for the different berths, some dozen or score of them, in which the steerage passengers had to sleep. No sort of privacy either by day or by night was possible; add to which, the ventilation was very insufficient, and the whole place was, perhaps unavoidably, dirty to a revolting degree. My father almost at once betook himself to his berth, and rarely left it during the entire voyage—indeed he was for the most part incapable of doing so, having been suffering from his usual sick headache more or less during the whole time. If the voyage was a bad time for me, it must have been far worse for him. Indeed I was scarcely ever below, except when attending on him.

Before the first night came, I declared my intention of making no use of the berth assigned to me. Where was I to pass the night then? I said I should pass it on deck. I had a huge great coat, a regular “dreadnought,” so called in those days, and made with innumerable capes; and with that I thought I should do well enough during the September night. My declared intention brought an avalanche of ridicule down on my head, not only from my fellow inhabitants of the steerage, but from the captain and his mates. A night on deck, or at the very most two, would make me glad and thankful enough for the shelter of my berth. I did not know what I was talking of, but should soon find out, &c.

Well, the first night passed! It was a fine moonlight. And I enjoyed it and the novelty of my surroundings keenly. I slept, wrapped in my capacious great coat, two or three hours at a time, and morning found me none the worse. The second night was less delightful! I was weary and began to feel the need of sleep after a fashion to which I was more accustomed. And then came bad weather, wet and cold! I got some shelter in an erection on the deck called the “round house;” but the want of proper rest was beginning to tell upon me, and the fatigue was very severe. I think that, despite my horror of the steerage and the world that inhabited it, I should have succumbed and accepted its shelter, if my determination not to do so had been confined to my own breast; and no necessity had existed for triumphing over the ridicule and the unanimous prophecies of the other passengers and the ship’s officers. As it was, I was safe not to yield!

I did not yield! Our voyage was rather longer than an average one, and during all the thirty-eight days that it lasted, I never passed a night below, or went there at all save for the purpose of changing my clothes, or attending on my father, who lay sick and suffering in his berth during almost the whole time. It was a severer experience than it may seem probably to the imagination of those who never made a similar experiment. When I reached New York, I felt as if it would be heaven to go to sleep for a week.

We had one short spell of very bad weather; and were, as I subsequently learned, in considerable danger for an hour or so. We had been running all day before a fair wind exactly aft, which, continually increasing in violence, assumed at sun-down the force of a gale. Nevertheless Captain Chadwick, against the advice of an old English merchant captain, who was a passenger, could not prevail on himself to lose the advantage of so good a wind, and determined to “carry on.” But as the night advanced the wind continued to increase and the sea to rise, till the danger of being “pooped,” if we continued to run before it, became too great to be neglected. But the danger of putting about, “broaching-to” I believe is the correct term, was also great.

It became necessary however to do this about midnight, and I was the only passenger on deck during the operation. The English merchant captain mentioned above kept running up for a few minutes at a time every now and then. But he had a wife and young children aboard, and would not remain long away from them. The good ship as she came round into the trough of the sea, lay down on her side to such a degree that my body as I clung to the bulwark on the weather-side swung away to the leeward in such sort that I was for a minute hanging from a hold above my head, instead of clinging to one at my side. And I saw and heard—very specially heard—every sail blown away from the yards. I heard, too, the shout of the men on the yards, “We can’t get an inch,” as they strove to reef. Much danger was occasioned to the men by the block at the foot of the mainsail remaining attached to the sail, which was blown about, before it could be secured, with a violence which knocked the cook’s galley to atoms.

And all this I saw to my great delight. For I considered a storm at sea as a part of the experiences of a voyage which it would have been a great pity to have missed, and was altogether unaware that we were in any real danger. Towards daybreak the gale moderated, and before noon it was perfectly calm, and all hands were busy in bending a new suite of sails.

With all this I should have enjoyed the voyage immensely had it not been for the nature of the companionship to which I should have been condemned if I had not escaped from it in the manner I have described. The utter roughness of the accommodation, the scanty and not very delicate food, would all have signified to me in those days absolutely nothing. But I could not tolerate the companionship of the men and women with whom I should have lived. I could have no doubt tolerated it some twenty years later, but it was at that time too new to me. I take it that ill-luck had given us a rather specially bad lot as our destined companions in the steerage. I had seen quite enough of the labourers on the farm at Harrow to know what a man living with his family on a pound a week was like, and I could have managed to live if necessary with such men for a week or two without any insuperable repugnance. But some of the denizens of that steerage bolgia were blackguards of a description quite new to me.

Two figures among them are still, after nearly sixty years, present to my mental vision. One was a large, loosely-made, middle-aged man, who always wore a long grey serge dressing-gown. He was accompanied by nobody belonging to him, and I never had the least idea what grade or department of life he could have belonged to. His language, though horrible, as regards the ideas conveyed by it, was grammatically far superior to that of most of those around him; and he was very clever with his hands, executing various little arrangements for his own comfort with the skill of a carpenter, and almost with that of an upholsterer. His face was thoroughly bad, with loose, baggy, flaccid, pale cheeks, and a great coarse hanging under lip. He always looked exceedingly dirty, but nevertheless was always clean shaved. He was always talking, always haranguing those who would listen to him; always extolling the country for which we were bound, and its institutions, and expressing the most venomous hatred of England and all things English. I used to listen to him during my hours of attendance on my father with an excess of loathing, which I doubt not I failed to conceal from him, and which, acting like a strong brine, has preserved his memory in my mind all these years.

The other was much less objectionable. He was a younger man, and called himself a farmer, but his farming had evidently run much to horse-dealing, and he dressed in a horsey style. He had a miserable sickly wife with him, who had once upon a time been pretty. She wore the remains of dresses that had once been smart, and was by far the most slatternly woman I ever saw. Her husband, so far as I could observe, did not ill-treat her, but he was constantly saying unkind things in language which should have made her blush, if she had not left all blushes far behind her, and at which the other worse brute used to laugh with obstreperous approbation. He could sing too, as I thought at that time very well, and used to sing a song telling how “The farm I now hold on your honour’s estate, is the same that my grandfather held,” &c. &c. The tune of it runs in my head to this day; and I remember thinking that if the song related the singer’s own fortunes, “his honour” must have gained by the change of tenant, however many generations of ancestors may have held it before him.

By the time our voyage came to an end I was pretty nearly worn out by want of rest and night and day exposure to the weather. But to own the truth honestly, I was supported by a sense of pride in having sustained an amount of fatigue which none other in the ship had, and few probably could have, sustained, and which I had been defied to sustain. And after I had had a sleep “the round of the clock,” as the phrase goes, I was none the worse. Moreover, it was a matter of extreme consolation to me to think that I was accumulating a store of strange experiences of a kind which nothing in my previous life had seemed to promise me. But above all the approach to New York, and the sight of the bay, was, I felt, more than enough to repay me for all the discomfort of the voyage. I thought it by far the grandest sight I had ever seen, as indeed it doubtless was.

I do not remember to have been much struck by the town of New York. I remember thinking it had the look of an overgrown colossal village, and that it was very different in appearance from any English city. It seemed to me too that there was a strange contrast between the roomy, clean, uncity-like appearance of the place, and the apparent hurry and energetic ways of the inhabitants. I remember also remarking the very generally youthful appearance of those who seemed to be transacting most of the business of the place.

We were received most kindly by an old friend of my parents, Mr. Wilkes, the uncle, I think, or perhaps great-uncle of him who as Commodore Wilkes of the Trent subsequently became known to the world, as having very nearly set his country and England by the ears! How and why old Mr. Wilkes was a friend of my father’s I do not know, but suspect that it was through the medium of some very old friends of my grandfather Milton, of the name of Garnet. Two very old ladies of that name, spinster sisters, I remember to have seen at Brighton some twenty or five and twenty years ago. I remember that Mr. Wilkes struck me as a remarkably courteous and gentlemanlike old man, very English both in manners and appearance, in a blue dress coat and buff waistcoat, and long white hair. I fancy that he was connected in some way (by old friendship only, I imagine,) with the Misses Wright, and I gathered that he altogether disapproved of Frances Wright’s philanthropic Nashoba enterprise, and consequently of the share in it which my father and mother, on behalf of my brother Henry, had undertaken. Of the wisdom of his misgivings the result furnished abundant proof.

My recollections of the journey from New York to Cincinnati are of a very fragmentary description, those of so very many other journeys during the well nigh sixty years which have elapsed since it was performed have nearly obliterated them. I remember being struck by the uncomfortable roughness of all the lodging accommodation, as contrasted with the great abundance, and even, as it appeared to me, luxury of the commissariat department.

We passed by Pittsburg and crossed the Alleghany Mountains, the former remaining in my memory as a nightmare of squalor, and the latter as a vision of beauty and delight. We travelled long days through districts of untouched forest over the often described “corduroy” roads. I was utterly disappointed by the forests; all that I saw of them appeared to me a miserable collection of lank, unwholesome-looking, woebegone stems, instead of Windsor Forest on a vastly increased scale, which was, I take it, what I expected. I remember, too, being much struck by the performance of the drivers of the stages over the corduroy roads aforesaid, and often over boggy tracts of half reclaimed forest amid the blackened stumps of burned trees. The things they proposed to themselves to accomplish, and did accomplish without coming to grief, other than shaking every tooth in the heads of their passengers, would have made an English coachman’s hair stand on end! To have seen them at their work over a decent bit of road would on the other hand have provoked the laughter and contempt of the same critics. Arms and legs seemed to take an equal part in the work; the whip was never idle, and the fatigue must have been excessive. I do not think that any man could have driven fifty miles at a stretch over those roads.

Cincinnati was reached at last. The journey to me had been delightful in the highest degree, simply from the novelty of everything. As things were done at that time it was one of very great fatigue, but in those days I seemed to be incapable of fatigue. At all events it was all child’s play in comparison with my crossing the ocean in the good ship Corinthian.

We found my mother and two sisters and my brother Henry well, and established in a roomy bright-looking house, built of wood, and all white with the exception of the green Venetian blinds. It stood in its own “grounds,” but these grounds consisted of a large field uncultivated save for a few potatoes in one corner of it; and the whole appearance of the place was made unkempt-looking—not squalid, because everything was too new and clean looking for that—by uncompleted essays towards the making of a road from the entrance-gate to the house, and by fragments of boarding and timber, which it had apparently been worth no one’s while to collect after the building of the house was completed. With all this there was an air of roominess and brightness which seemed to me very pleasant. The house was some five or ten minutes’ walk from what might be considered the commencement of the town, but it is no doubt by this time, if it still stands at all, more nearly in the centre of it.

CHAPTER VIII.

Looking back to those Cincinnati days, I have to say that I liked the Americans, principally, I think, at that time, as far as my remembrances serve, because some quality in their manners and behaviour had the effect of making me less shy with them than with others. I was then, and to a great degree have never ceased to be, painfully shy. How miserably this weakness afflicts those who suffer from it, how it disqualifies them and puts them at a disadvantage in circumstances constantly recurring, those who are free from it cannot imagine. And they glorify their superiority by saying all sorts of hard things of those who suffer from shyness—very unjustly in my opinion. Shyness proceeds in almost all cases, I should say probably in all, from diffidence. A man who thinks sufficiently well of himself is never shy. Did any one ever see a vain man shy? I do not think the Americans are an especially vain people; but there are specialties of their social condition which lead to every American citizen’s estimate of himself, from the cradle upwards, being equal to his estimate of any other man. And one consequence of this is a certain frank and unconstrained manner in their intercourse with strangers or new acquaintances which is invaluable to a shy man.

I remember an incident of my first year at Winchester, when I was between ten and eleven, which is illustrative of the misery which shyness may inflict. A boy about a year my senior, and taller than I, was constantly annoying and bullying me, and one day in the presence of a considerable number of onlookers challenged me to fight him. I refused, and naturally of course was considered a coward, and had to endure the jibes and taunts due to one. The explanation of my refusal of my enemy’s challenge however—never offered to mortal ear before the confiding of it to this page—was not that I was afraid to fight, but was too shy to do so. It was not that I could not face all that his fists could do to me, as I shortly afterwards showed him; but I could not bring myself to face the publicity of the proposed contest—the formality of it, the ring, in the centre of which I should have to perform, and to be a spectacle, and have my performance criticised. All this was too absolutely intolerable to me. But early the next morning, chancing to catch my adversary “in meads” with only one or two others near him, I attacked him to his utter astonishment and dismay, and without very much difficulty gave him as good a pummelling as my heart desired.

Whether this incident originated the nickname “Badger,” which I bore at Winchester, as being one indisposed to fight, but likely to prove dangerous if “drawn,” I do not know.

It was during our stay at Cincinnati that my father and I paid a visit to an establishment of “Shaking Quakers,” as they were called, and I believe called themselves at Mount Lebanon, about five and twenty miles from Cincinnati. We were hospitably received, paying a moderate remuneration for our lodging and food. Both these were supplied of exactly the same kind and quality as used by the inmates of the establishment, and were, though very simple and plain, admirable in quality. The extensive farm, on which the Shakers lived, and which they cultivated by their own labour, was their own property, having been originally purchased at a time when land was of very small market value, and brought under tillage by the labour of the members. But nothing in the nature of private property was held or retained by any one.

The number of women was about equal to that of the men. But there were no children. None were born in the establishment, and no man or woman joining it was allowed to bring any. Nor was marriage or connubial life in any sort recognised or permitted. And of course these conditions rendered the whole experiment wholly useless as an example for the conduct of any ordinary community, or for an indication of what may be economically accomplished for such.

We did not eat in company with the members, though faring, as I have said, exactly as they did, but we were present at their religious worship, or at what stood in the place of such. This consisted in a species of dance, if the uncouth jumping or “shaking” which they practised could be so called. The men and women were assembled and danced in the same room, but not together. They jumped and “shook” themselves in two divided bodies. Any spectator would be disposed to imagine that the whole object of the performance was bodily exercise. It seemed to be carried on to the utmost extent that breath and bodily fatigue would permit. Many were mopping the perspiration from their faces. No laughing or gladness, or exhilaration whatever appeared to accompany or to be caused by the exercise. All was done with an air of perfect solemnity.

All the men and all the women seemed to be in the enjoyment of excellent health. Most of them seemed to be somewhat more than well nourished—rather tending to obesity. They were florid, round-faced, sleek and heavy in figure. I observed no laughter, and very little conversation among them. The women were almost all in the prime of life, and many young. But there was a singular absence of good looks among them. Some had regular features enough, but they were all heavy, fat, dull-looking, like well-kept animals. I could not spy one pair of bright eyes in the place. All, men and women, were quite simply but thoroughly well and cleanly dressed, not altogether, as I remember, in uniform, but with very great uniformity. Grey cloth of very fair quality was the prevailing material of dress for both sexes.

Various articles useful for country life of the simpler sort were manufactured by them for sale. And I learned that all the articles so made had throughout the country side a high reputation for excellence in their kinds. And there could be no doubt that the Shaker community was thriving and probably accumulating money. To what object they should do so seems a difficult question.

I heard of no sickness or infirmity among them. Such there must of course have been occasionally, and I presume that the infirm, the sick, and the dying must have been cared for.

These people lived in perfect equality; and their community proved that a community of men and women (unburthened with children) could by an amount of labour by no means excessive, or even arduous, provide themselves with an ample sufficiency of all things needful for their material well-being and comfort. It is true that they paid no rent, but I am disposed to think, from what I heard, that they might have paid a moderate rent for the land they cultivated, and still continued to do well. But it was impossible to avoid the reflection that this well-being was merely that of well-kept animals. There was an air of unmistakable stupidity over the whole establishment. Nobody laughed. Nobody seemed to converse. There was excellent lodging, clothing, and food in plenty till they died! And that was all. Perhaps it may be fairly assumed that no one, save people of very mediocre powers and intelligence, had ever felt tempted to become a Shaking Quaker. But it can hardly be said that their experiment exhibited a very tempting sample of a world to be modelled after their fashion!

It has been said by some observers that this materially flourishing establishment has so many points of similarity with the conventual institutions of Roman Catholicism that it may be considered as supplying the same natural want to which those institutions are supposed to correspond, an asylum, that is to say, for those of either sex, who, from various circumstances of fortune, or of temperament, are unfitted for the struggles of the world, and find themselves left stranded on the banks of the great social stream. The impressions I received from my visit to Mount Lebanon do not dispose me to accept any such explanation of the Shaking Quaker raison d’être. I saw no signs whatever, among either the men or the women, of individuals who had been tempest-tossed in any of the world’s maelstroms, or of temperaments for which the contemplative life might be supposed to have had greater attractions than the active life of the world. The characteristics which were most notably observable were of a diametrically opposed kind. One would say that they were men and women thoroughly and unanimously minded to make for themselves in the most judiciously contrived manner a comfortable and clean sty, with abundant and perennial supply of everything needed for their bodily wants. Whether love or hatred, as they are found to exist in monastic communities, existed among them, of course I had not sufficient opportunity for even guessing. But assuredly it may be said with some confidence of not being mistaken, that neither those nor any other passions had left any of their usual marks on those sleek bodies and placid meaningless faces. One would have said that the main and engrossing object of existence at Mount Lebanon was digesting.

I have recently learned that the community continues to exist under the same conditions as those under which I saw it.

I made acquaintance, I remember, at Cincinnati, with Mr. Longworth, who was, or became well known throughout America for his successful efforts in viticulture. He was one of those men who, being by no means entertaining companions on any other subject, become so, if you will talk to them upon their own. I have often thought that the “sink the shop” maxim is a great mistake. If I had to pass an hour with a chimney-sweep, I should probably find him very good company if he would talk exclusively about sweeping chimneys. Mr. Longworth was extremely willing to talk exclusively on schemes for the introduction of the vine into the western states, and on that subject was well worth listening to. I find a note in a diary, written by me at that time, to the effect that he was then (1828) employing a large number of Germans on his estate at Columbia near Cincinnati at a little less than one shilling a day and their food. I remarked that this seemed scarcely in accord with the current accounts of the high price of labour in the states, and was answered that his—Mr. Longworth’s—bailiff had said to him the other day, “If those men get to Cincinnati they will be spoiled”—a little touch which rather vividly illustrates one phase of the difference made in all things by railway communication.

But the most remarkable acquaintance we made at Cincinnati was Hiram Powers, the subsequently well-known sculptor, with whom I again fell in many years afterwards at Florence, when he was living there with his large family, having just acquired a large and lucrative degree of celebrity by his statue of “The Greek Slave,” purchased by an Englishman whom my mother had taken to visit his studio. I do not know by what chance she had first become acquainted with him at Cincinnati.

He was at that time about eighteen years old, much about my own contemporary; and my mother at once remarked him as a young man of exceptional talent and promise. He was at that time seeking to live by his wits, with every prospect of finding that capital abundantly sufficient for the purpose. There was a Frenchman named Dorfeuille at Cincinnati, who had established what he called a “museum,”—a show, in fact, in which he collected anything and everything that he thought would excite the curiosity of the people and induce them to pay their quarter dollars for admission. And this M. Dorfeuille, cleverly enough appreciating young Powers’s capabilities of being useful to him, had engaged him as factotum and general manager of his establishment. Powers, casting about for some new “attraction” for the museum, chanced one evening to talk over the matter with my mother. And it occurred to her to suggest to him to get up a representation of one of Dante’s bolgias as described in the Inferno, The nascent sculptor, with his imaginative brain, artistic eye, and clever fingers, caught at the idea on the instant. And forthwith they set to work, my mother explaining the poet’s conceptions, suggesting the composition of “tableaux,” and supplying details, while Powers designed and executed the figures and the necessary mise en scène.

Some months of preparation were needed before the work could be accomplished, and Dorfeuille, I remember, began to have misgivings as to recouping himself for the not inconsiderable cost. But at last all was ready. A vast amount of curiosity had been excited in the place by preliminary announcements, and the result was an immense success. I have preserved for nearly sixty years, and have now before me, the programme and bill of the exhibition as it was drawn up by my mother. It is truly a curiosity in its kind, and I am tempted to reproduce it here. But it is too long, occupying four pages of a folio sheet. There are quotations from the Inferno, translated by my mother (no copy of any published translation being then and there procurable), explanations of the author’s meaning, and descriptions in very bugaboo style, and in every variety of type with capitals of every sort of size, of all the horrors of the supposed scene.

The success was so great, and the curiosity, not only of the Cincinnati world but of the farmers round about and their families, was so eager, that the press of spectators was inconveniently great, and M. Dorfeuille began to fear that his properties might be damaged by indiscreet desires to touch as well as see. So Powers arranged a slight metal rod as a barrier between the show and the spectators, and contrived to charge it with electricity, while an announcement, couched in terrible and mystic terms and in verse, by my mother, to the effect that an awful doom awaited any mortal rash enough to approach the mysteries of the nether world too nearly, was appended to the doors and walls. The astonishment and dismay felt, and the laughter provoked, by those who were rash enough to do so, may be imagined!

Upon the whole those autumn and winter months passed pleasantly, and have left pleasant recollections in my memory. Doubtless there were many causes of anxiety for my elders; but to the best of my remembrance they touched us young people very lightly. We had many more or less agreeable acquaintances, and I have a vivid recollection of the pleasure I received from the fact that they all belonged to types that were altogether new to me—if indeed it could be said of people, to me so apparently unclassifiable, that they belonged to any type at all. The cleverest among them was a Dr. Price, a very competent physician with a large practice, a foolish friendly little wife and a pair of pretty daughters. He was a jovial, florid, rotund little man who professed, more even, as I remember, to my astonishment than my horror, perfect Atheism. His wife and daughters used to go to church without apparently producing the slightest interruption of domestic harmony. “La! the Doctor don’t think anything more of the Bible than of an old newspaper!” Mrs. Price would say; “but then doctors, you know, they have their own opinions!” And the girls used to say, “Papa is an Atheist,” just as they would have said of the multiform persuasions of their acquaintances, “Mr. This is a Baptist,” and “Mrs. That is a Methodist.” And I remember well the confusion and displacement occasioned in my mind by finding that Dr. Price did not seem on the whole to be an abandoned man, and enjoyed to a high degree the respect of his townsmen.

The two pretty daughters, girls of eighteen or nineteen, used to have at their house frequent dances. We were constant and welcome guests, but alas! I was not—either then or ever since—a dancer; the reason being precisely the same as that which prevented my fighting at Winchester, as above recorded. I was too shy! In other words I had too low an opinion of myself, of my performance as a dancer, should I attempt it, and above all of my acceptability as a partner, ever to overcome my diffidence.

I was, as I have said when speaking of my earliest years, by no means a prepossessing child, and as a young man I was probably less so. I had never any sort of pretension to good looks, or to elegance of figure. I was five feet eight in height, and thick, sturdy, and ungainly in make, healthy and pure in complexion and skin as a baby, but with an “abbreviated nose”—as George Eliot says of me in finding me like a portrait of Galileo—and pale coloured lanky hair. All which would not have signified a button, if I could have been as ignorant of the facts in question as hundreds of my contemporaries, labouring under equal disadvantages, were in their own case; but I was not ignorant of these facts, and the consciousness of them constituted a most mischievous and disqualifying little repast off the tree of knowledge. It has, among many other results, prevented me from ever dancing. I should have liked much, very much to do so. I was abundantly well disposed to seek the society of the other sex. Though I never had a very perfect ear for tune, I had a markedly strong perception of time, and feeling for rhythm, and therefore should probably have danced well. But the persuasion that any girl, whom I might have induced to dance with me, would have far rather been dancing with somebody else, was too much for me!

I should unquestionably have been a far happier young fellow, if I had undoubtingly believed myself to have been adapted in all respects to attract the favourable attention and conciliate the liking of all I met. But can I even now, looking back over the vista of sixty years, regret that I was able to see myself as others saw me, and wish that I had inhabited that fool’s paradise, which is planted with conceits in place of insights?

So I got no dancing with the Cincinnati girls. But there were theatricals, also at the house of Dr. and Mrs. Price, and in those I did not refuse to join. It may seem that this would have been at least as great a trial to a shy man as any other form of self-exhibition; but it was not so. I think, so far as I am able at this distance of time to examine my mind upon the subject, it would have been impossible for me to attempt the representation of any personage intended to be attractive to the spectator, or such as to be confounded in his mind with my own personality. But it was proposed that I should act Falstaff in the Merry Wives of Windsor, and to this the difficulties referred to did not apply. I played Falstaff with immense success to an assuredly not very critical audience. My own impression however is, that I did it well. I think that I had reason to flatter myself, as I did flatter myself at the time, that all those, who heard me, understood the play, and enjoyed the humour of the situations better than they had done before.

I have played many parts since on various stages in different parts of the world, but that, I think, was my sole Shakesperian attempt. And the members of that merry and kindly theatrical company! They have made their last exit from the larger boards we are all treading, every man and woman, every lad and lass of them. Not one but the old Falstaff of the company remains to write this chronicle of sixty years since!

There were very few formal meetings among the notabilities of the little Cincinnati world of that time, but there was an amount of homely friendliness that impressed me very favourably; and there was plenty of that generous and abounding hospitality which subsequent experience has taught me to consider an especially American characteristic. I have since that time shared the splendid hospitality of splendid American hosts, and I have been under American roofs where there was little save a heartfelt welcome to offer. But the heartwarming effect produced by the latter was the same in both cases. How often have we all sat at magnificent boards where the host’s too evident delight consisted in giving you what you could not give him, and in the exulting manifestation of his magnificence. This is very rarely the feeling of an American host. He is thinking not of himself, but of you; and the object he is striving at when giving you of his best is that you should enjoy yourself while under his roof; that you should have, as he would phrase it, “a good time.” And upon my word he almost invariably succeeds.

Nor were the Cincinnati girls in 1829 like the New York belles of 1887. But there was much of the same charm about them, which arises from unaffected and unself-regarding desire to please. American girls are accused of being desperate flirts. But many an Englishman has been deceived by imagining that the smiles and cheerfulness and laughing chatter of some charming girl new to Europe were intended for his special benefit, when they were in truth only the perfectly natural and unaffected outcome of a desire to do her duty in that state of life to which it had pleased God to call her! Only beams falling, like those of the sun, upon the just and the unjust alike!

There is another point on which Americans, both men and women, are very generally called over the coals by English people, as I think somewhat unreasonably. They are, it is said, everlastingly talking about the greatness and grandeur of their country, and never easy without extorting admissions of this. All this is to a great extent true—at least to this extent, that an American is always pleased to hear the greatness of his country recognised. But when I remember the thoroughness with which that cardinal article of an Englishman’s faith (sixty years ago!), that every Englishman could thrash three Frenchmen, was enforced with entire success on my youthful mind, I can hardly find it in my conscience to blame an American’s pride in his country. Why, good heavens! what an insensible block he would be if he was not proud of his country, to whose greatness, it is to be observed, each individual American now extant has contributed in a greater degree than can be said to be the case as regards England and every extant Englishman; inasmuch as our position has been won by the work of, say, a thousand years, and his by that of less than a century. Surely the creation of the United States as they now exist within that time is such a feat of human intelligence and energy as the world has never before seen, and is scarcely likely to see again. I confess that the expression of American patriotism is never offensive to me. I feel somewhat as the old Cornish wrestler felt, who said with immense pride, when he was told that his son had “whopped” the whole parish, “Ay, I should think so! Why, he has whopped me afore now!”

Yes! I liked the Americans as I first made acquaintance with them almost among the backwoods at Cincinnati sixty years ago; and I like them as I have since known them better. For I have seen a great deal of them; far more than an Englishman living at home would be likely to do, during my many years’ residence in Italy. The American “colony,” to use the common though incorrect phrase, is large both at Florence and in Rome—of late years fully as large, I think, as that from England. And not only do the two bodies associate indiscriminately with each other in perfect neighbourliness and good fellowship, but they do so, forming one single oasis in the midst of the surrounding continental life, in a manner which makes one constantly feel how infinitely nearer an American is to an Englishman in ideas, habits, ways, and civilisation, than either of them are to any other denizen of earth’s surface.

I was sorry when the time came for us to leave Cincinnati, though as usual with me, the prospect of the journey, which we were to make by a different route from that by which we had travelled westward, was a joy and a consolation. My father and I returned, leaving my mother, my two sisters still quite children, and my brother Henry at Cincinnati. The proposed institution—bazaar, athenæum, lecture-hall, or whatever it was to be, or to be called—had been determined on, and the site, to the best of my recollection, selected and purchased; but nothing had yet been done towards raising the building. Contracts had been entered into, and my father was on his return to London to send out a quantity of goods for the carrying out of the commercial part of the scheme.

He did so. But I had no share in or knowledge of the operations undertaken for this purpose, and may therefore as well relate here the upshot of the ill-fated enterprise. I learned subsequently that very large quantities of goods were sent out, of kinds and qualities totally unfitted for the purpose. The building was duly raised, and I have been told by Americans who had seen it, that it was a handsome and imposing one. But the net result was disaster and ruin. My father having been educated to be a Chancery barrister, was a good one. He became a farmer with no training or knowledge necessary for the calling, and it proved ruinous to him. He then embarked on this commercial speculation, which, inasmuch as he was still more ignorant of all such matters, than he was even of farming, turned out still more entirely disastrous.

My father and I, as I have said, did not return from Cincinnati to New York by the same route by which we had travelled westward. We went by the lakes and Niagara, visiting also Trenton Falls en route. Had I written this page immediately after my journey, instead of sixty years after, I might have been justified in attempting—and no doubt should in any case have attempted—some description of the great “water privilege,” which I saw as it will never be seen again. The two great cataclysms which have occurred since that time, have entirely changed, and in a great measure spoiled, the great sight. And now, I am told, this “so-called nineteenth century” (as I read the other day in the fervid discourse of some pessimist orator) intends before it closes to utilise the lake as a milldam and the fall as so much “power.”

I remember that I enjoyed Trenton most. It appealed much less, of course, to the imagination and the sense of wonder, but far more to one’s, appreciation of the beautiful.

Our Niagara visit was in great measure spoiled by my father’s illness. He was suffering from one of his worst sick headaches. He dragged himself painfully to the usual spot near the hotel whence the fall is commanded, and, having looked, got back to his bed. I had plenty of hours at my disposal for rambling in all directions, but, as usual with me, had not a coin of any sort in my pocket. The fall and its environs were not as jealously locked and gated and guarded as has been the case since; but I was assured that I should be very unwise to attempt to penetrate below and behind the fall without a guide, and I should have been most willing to employ one had I possessed the means. But to lose the opportunity of enjoying a sight to which I had so eagerly looked forward, was out of the question; and I did succeed in making my way by the slippery and rather terrible path behind the fall, rewarded by an effect of the sun on the sheet of falling water as perfect and admirable as if it had been ordered expressly for me, and none the worse for the enterprise save returning to the inn as thoroughly drenched as if I had been dragged through the fall! Little enough I cared for that—in those days!

I may mention here one of those singular coincidences which, though in reality so frequently occurring, are objected to in a novelist’s pages as passing the bounds of credibility. Many years after the date of my visit to Niagara the mother of my present wife was there, and saw from the balcony of the hotel a boat with two rowers in it, who had incautiously approached too near the fall, carried over it! Her account of the horror of the sight, and of the sudden and evident despair of the frantically struggling rowers was very impressive, and hardly less so when I heard it for the second time from an American met by chance in Italy, who, sitting in that same balcony at that same hour, had witnessed the same catastrophe!

At New York we were again most kindly and cordially received by Mr. Wilkes, who gave my father much advice respecting his projected Cincinnati venture—advice wholly, as I take it, ignored.

Taught by experience, however, my father did not attempt a second steerage passage. We came back comfortably enough, and had an entirely prosperous voyage, the result being that my remembrances of it are very far less vivid than those of my steerage experience. We reached England in March, and again took up our abode at Harrow Weald, where I, with such very imperfect means and appliances as were at my disposition, was to employ the abundant hours in preparing, in accordance with my own unassisted lights, for the university.

Bad, however, as my father’s circumstances were at this time, and little pleasant in any way as was our life in the farm-house at Harrow Weald, I remember an excursion made by him and me, the only object of which, I think, could have been amusement. My father had an old friend named Skinner (no relative of the vicar of my uncle Meetkerke’s parish of Julians, of whom I have spoken in a former chapter), who was the rector of a parish near Bath. He was a widower, living with an only daughter, and was, I remember, an enthusiastic student of ancient British history in connection with the localities around him. One of the two days we remained with him was devoted to a visit to Cheddar Cliffs. Mr. Skinner mounted us, and we rode a partie carrée, he and my father, Miss Skinner and I, some twelve or fourteen miles to Cheddar. She was a pretty, bright girl, and I found her a charming companion in a scramble to the top of the cliffs overlooking the gorge through which the road runs. We became, indeed, such good friends, that, on our homeward ride, we gradually drew away from our respective parents and reached home a good half hour before they did—which procured for us both a scolding for knocking the horses up.

It was roughish riding, too, as I remember, for the road was very different from what I found it some months ago, when, revisiting Cheddar, I saw on the top of the hill a notice to bicycle riders that the descent is dangerous for them.