i was, i think, about eight years old when my parents removed from keppel street to harrow-on-the-hill. my father’s practice, i take it, was becoming less and less satisfactory, and his health equally so. and the move to harrow was intended as a remedy or palliation for both these evils. my father was a very especially industrious and laborious man. and i have the authority of more than one very competent judge among his professional contemporaries for believing that he was as learned a chancery lawyer as was to be found among them. how then was his want of success to be accounted for? one of the competent authorities above alluded to accounted for it thus: “your father,” he said to me many years afterwards, when his troubles and failures had at last ceased to afflict him, “never came into contact with a blockhead without insisting on irrefutably demonstrating to him that he was such. and the blockhead did not like it! he was a disputatious man; and he was almost in variably—at least on a point of law—right. but the world differed from{58} him in the opinion that being so gave him the right of rolling his antagonist in the dust and executing an intellectual dance of triumph on his prostrate form.” he was very fond of whist, and was i believe a good player. but people did not like to play with him. “many men,” said an old friend once, “will scold their partners occasionally. but trollope invariably scolds us all round with the utmost impartiality; and that every deal!”
he was, in a word, a highly respected, but not a popular or well-beloved man. worst of all, alas! he was not popular in his own home. no one of all the family circle was happy in his presence. assuredly he was as affectionate and anxiously solicitous a father as any children ever had. i never remember his caning, whipping, beating or striking any one of us. but he used during the detested latin lessons to sit with his arm over the back of the pupil’s chair, so that his hand might be ready to inflict an instantaneous pull of the hair as the p?na (by no means pede claudo) for every blundered concord or false quantity; the result being to the scholar a nervous state of expectancy, not judiciously calculated to increase intellectual receptivity. there was also a strange sort of asceticism about him, which seemed to make enjoyment or any employment of the hours save work, distasteful and offensive to him. lessons for us boys were never over and done with. it was sufficient for my father to see any one of us “idling,” i.e. not occupied with book work, to set us to work{59} quite irrespectively of the previously assigned task of the day having been accomplished. and this we considered to be unjust and unfair.
i have said that the move to harrow was in some degree caused by a hope that the change might be beneficial to my father’s health. he had suffered very distressingly for many years from bilious headache, which gradually increased upon him during the whole of his life. i may say parenthetically that from about fifteen to forty i suffered occasionally, about once a fortnight perhaps, from the same malady, though in a much less intense form. but at about forty years old i seemed to have grown out of it, and since that time have never been troubled by it. but in my father’s day the common practice was to treat such complaints with calomel. he was constantly having recourse to that drug. and i believe that it had the effect of shattering his nervous system in a deplorable manner. he became increasingly irritable; never with the effect of causing him to raise a hand against any one of us, but with the effect of making intercourse with him so sure to issue in something unpleasant, that unconsciously we sought to avoid his presence, and to consider as hours of enjoyment only those that could be passed away from it.
my mother’s disposition on the other hand was of the most genial, cheerful, happy, enjoué nature imaginable. all our happiest hours were spent with her; and to any one of us a tête-à-tête with her was preferable to any other disposal of a holiday hour.{60} but even this under all the circumstances did not tend to the general harmony and happiness of the family circle. for of course the facts and the results of them must have been visible to my father; and though wholly inoperative to produce the smallest change in his ways, must, i cannot doubt, have been painful to him. it was all very sad. my father was essentially a good man. but he was, i fear, a very unhappy one.
he was extremely fond of reading aloud to the assembled family in the evening; and there was not one individual of those who heard him who would not have escaped from doing so, at almost any cost. of course it was our duty to conceal this extreme reluctance to endure what was to him a pleasure—a duty which i much fear was very imperfectly performed. i remember—oh, how well!—the nightly readings during one winter of sir charles grandison, and the loathing disgust for that production which they occasioned.
but i do not think that i and my brothers were bad boys. we were, i take it, always obedient. and one incident remains in my mind from a day now nearly seventy years ago, which seems to prove that the practice of that virtue was habitual to me. an old friend of my mother’s, mrs. gibbon, with her daughter kate, mentioned on a former page as the companion of my lessons in the alphabet, were staying with us at harrow. mrs. gibbon and kate, and my mother and i were returning from a long country ramble, across some fields in a part of the{61} country my mother was not acquainted with. there was a steep grassy declivity, down which i and the little girl, my contemporary, hand in hand were running headlong in front of our respective parents, when my mother suddenly called out, “stop, tom!” i stopped forthwith, and came to heel as obediently as a well-trained pointer. and about five minutes later, my mother and mrs. gibbon, following exactly in the line in which we had been running, discovered a long disused but perfectly open and unfenced well!
if i had not obeyed so promptly as i did, i should not now be writing “reminiscences,” and poor “katy ’bon,” as i used to call her, would have gone to her rest some ten years earlier than she found it. my mother always said that she could in no wise account for the impulse which prompted her to call to me to stop!
the move to harrow was as infelicitous a step in the economic point of view as it was inefficacious as a measure of health. my father took a farm, of some three or four hundred acres, to the best of my recollection, from lord northwick. it was a wholly disastrous speculation. it certainly was the case that he paid a rent for it far in excess of its fair value; and he always maintained that he had been led to undertake to do so by inaccurate and false representations. i have no knowledge of these representations, but i am absolutely certain that my father was entirely convinced that they were such as he characterised them. but he was educated to be{62} a lawyer, and was a good one. he had never been educated to be a farmer; and was, i take it, despite unwearied activity, and rising up early and late taking rest, a bad one.
to make matters worse moreover he built on that land, of which he held only a long lease, a large and very good house. the position was excellently chosen, the house was well conceived and well built, and the extensive gardens and grounds were well designed and laid out; but the unwisdom of doing all that on land the property of another is but too obvious.
the excuse that my father might have alleged was that he was by no means wholly dependent either on his profession or on his farm, or on the not inconsiderable property which he had inherited from his father or enjoyed in right of his wife. he had an old maternal uncle, adolphus meetkerke, who lived on his estate near royston in hertfordshire, called julians. mr. meetkerke—the descendant of a dutchman who had come to this country some time in the eighteenth century as diplomatic representative of his country, and had settled here—lived at julians with an old childless wife—the daughter, i believe, of a general chapman—and my father was his declared heir. he had another nephew, mr. john young, as flourishing and prosperous an attorney as my father was an unsuccessful and unprosperous barrister. john young, too, was as worthy and as highly-respected a man as any in the profession. but my father, as settled long years{63} before, was to be the heir; and i was in due time shown to the tenantry as their future landlord, and all that sort of thing. i suppose my grandfather, the rev. anthony trollope, of cottenham in hertfordshire, married an elder sister of old adolphus meetkerke, while the father of john young married a younger one. and so, come what might of the harrow farm and the new house, i was to be the future owner of julians, and live on my own acres.
again, d?s aliter visum!
i well remember more than one visit to julians with my parents about this time—visits singularly contrasted with those to my grandfather milton, the vicar of heckfield. the house and establishment at julians were on a far more pretentious scale than the home of the vicar, and the mode of life in the squire’s establishment larger and freer. but i liked heckfield better than julians; partly, i think, even at that early age, because the former is situated in an extremely pretty country, whereas the neighbourhood of the other is by no means such. but i please myself with thinking, and do really believe, that the main reason for the preference was that the old bristol saddler’s son was a far more highly-cultured man than the hertfordshire squire.
he was a good man, too, was old adolphus meetkerke; a good landlord, a kindly natured man, a good sportsman, an active magistrate, and a good husband to his old wife. but there was a sort of flavour of roughness about the old squire and his{64} surroundings which impressed itself on my observation even in those days, and would, i take it, nowadays be deemed almost clownish rusticity.
right well do i remember the look and figure of my aunt meetkerke, properly great-aunt-in-law. she was an admirable specimen of a squiress, as people and things were in that day. i suppose that there was not a poor man or woman in the parish with whose affairs of all sorts she was not intimately acquainted, and to whom she did not play the part of an ever-active providence. she always came down to breakfast clad in a green riding-habit, and passed most of her life on horseback. after dinner, in the long low drawing-room, with its faded stone-coloured curtains and bookless desert spaces, she always slept, as peacefully as she does now in julians churchyard. she never meddled at all with the housekeeping of her establishment. that was in the hands of “mrs. anne,” an old maiden sister of mr. meetkerke. she was a prim-looking, rosy-apple-faced, most good-natured little woman. she always carried a little basket in her hand, in which were the keys, and a never-changed volume of miss austen’s pride and prejudice, which she always recommenced as soon as she had worked her way to the end of it. though a very precise sort of person, she would frequently come down to breakfast a few minutes late, to find her brother standing on the hearth-rug with his prayer-book open in his hand waiting for her arrival to begin prayers to the assembled household. he had a wonderfully strong{65} rasping voice, the tones of which were rarely modulated under any circumstances. i can hear now his reverberating, “five minutes too late again, mrs. anne; ‘dearly beloved brethren,’” ... etc., the change of person addressed, and of subject, having been marked by no pause or break whatever save the sudden kneeling at the head of the breakfast table; while at the conclusion of the short, but never missed prayers, the transition from “amen” to “william, bring round the brown mare after breakfast” was equally unmarked by pause or change of voice or manner.
the parish in which julians is situated is a small vicarage, the incumbent of which was at that time a bachelor, mr. skinner. the church was a very small one, and my great-uncle and his family the only persons in the congregation above the rank of the two or three small farmers and the agricultural labourers who mainly composed it. whether there was any clerk or not i do not remember. but if any such official existed, the performance of his office in church was altogether not only overlaid but extinguished by the great rough “view-halloa” sort of voice of my uncle. he never missed going to church, and never missed a word of the responses, which were given in far louder tones than those of the vicar. something of a hymn was always attempted, i remember, by the rustic congregation; with what sort of musical effect may be imagined! i don’t think my uncle meetkerke could have distinguished much between their efforts and the music{66} of the spheres. but the singers were so well pleased with the exercise that they were apt to prolong it, as my uncle thought, somewhat unduly. and on such occasions he would cut the performance short with a rasping “that’s enough!” which effectually brought it to an abrupt conclusion. the very short sermon—probably a better one for the purpose in hand than south or andrews would have preached—having been brought to an end, my uncle would sing out to the vicar, as he was descending the pulpit stairs, “come up to dinner, skinner!” and then we all marched out, while the rustics, still retaining their places till we were fairly out of the door, made their obeisances as we passed. all which phenomena, strongly contrasted as they were with the decorous if somewhat sleepy performance in my grandfather’s church at heckfield, greatly excited my interest. i remember that i had no dislike to attending service either at heckfield or julians, while i intensely disliked making one of a london congregation.
if i remember right there were two or three dissenters and their families at heckfield, generally considered by their neighbours much as so many chinese settled among them might have been—as unaccountably strange and as objectionable. but nothing of the sort existed at julians; and i take it, as far as may be judged from my uncle’s general tone and manner in managing his parish, that any individual guilty of such monstrous and unnatural depravity would at once have been consigned to the parish stocks.{67}
mr. meetkerke was, as i have said, an active magistrate. but only one instance of his activity in this respect dwells in my recollection. i remember to have seen, in the nondescript little room that he called his study, a collection of some ten or a dozen very nasty-looking pots, with some white pasty looking substance in each of them, and to have wondered greatly what mystery could have been attached to them. i learned from the butler’s curt word of information that they were connected with my uncle’s magisterial duties, and my mind immediately began to construct all kinds of imaginings about wholesale poisonings. i had heard the story of the “untori” at milan, and had little doubt that we were in the midst of some such horrible conspiracy. a few days later i learned that the nasty-looking pots were the result of a magisterial raid among the bakers, and contained nothing worse than alum.
these reminiscences of julians and its little world recurred to me when speaking of my father’s financial position at the time he took a farm at harrow and built a handsome house on another man’s land. he was at that time mr. meetkerke’s declared heir, and would doubtless have inherited his property in due time had childless old mrs. meetkerke lived. but one day she unexpectedly took off her green habit for the last time, and in a day or two was laid under yet more perennial green in the little churchyard! mr. meetkerke was at that time over sixty. but he was as fine an old man physically as anybody could wish to see. before long he married a young wife,{68} and became the father of six children! it was of course a tremendous blow to my father, and never, as i can say from much subsequent information, was such a blow better or more bravely borne. as for myself, i cannot remember that the circumstance impressed me as having any bearing whatsoever on my personal fate and fortunes. in after years i heard it asserted in more than one quarter that my father had in a great measure himself to thank for his disappointment. he was a liberal in politics after the fashion of those days, (which would make excellent conservatism in these,) while mr. meetkerke was a tory of the very oldest school. the tory uncle was very far indeed from being an intellectual match for his liberal nephew, and no doubt used to talk in his fine old hunting-field voice a great deal of nonsense which no consideration of either affection, respect, or prudence, could induce my father to spare. i fear he used to jump on the hearty old squire very persistently, with the result à la longue of ceasing to be a persona grata to the old man. it may be that had it been otherwise he might have sought affection and companionship elsewhere than from a young wife. but ...!
my father, as i have said, struggled bravely with fortune, but as far as i have ever been able to learn, with ever increasing insuccess. his practice as a barrister dwindled away gradually till it became not worth while to keep chambers; and his farming accounts showed very frequently—every year, i suspect—a deficit.{69}
one of the reasons for selecting harrow as his scene of rustication had been the existence of the school there. i and my brothers were all of us destined from our cradles to become wykehamists, and it was never my father’s intention that harrow instead of winchester should be our definitive place of education. but the idea was, that we might, before going to winchester, avail ourselves of the right to attend his parish school which john lyon bequeathed to the parishioners of harrow.
i went to winchester at ten years old. the time for me to do so did not wholly depend on the will of my parents, for the admission in those days, as in all former days up to quite recent times, was by nomination in this wise. there were six electors:—1. the warden of new college, (otherwise more accurately in accordance with the terms of wykeham’s foundation, the college of st. mary winton prope winton); 2. the warden of winchester college; 3. the sub-warden of winchester; 4. the “informator” or head master of winchester; and 5. and 6. two “posers” sent yearly by new college, according to a certain cycle framed ad hoc, to the winchester election. it was at the election which took place in july that all vacancies among the seventy scholars, who together with the warden, fellows, two masters, chaplains, and choristers constituted the members of wykeham’s foundation, were filled. the vacancies were caused either by the election of scholars to be fellows of new college, or by their superannuation at eighteen years of age, or by their withdrawal from{70} the school. the number of vacancies in any year was therefore altogether uncertain. the first two vacancies were filled by boys who came in as “college founders,” i.e. as of kin to the founder. of course the bishop’s kin could be only collateral; and i remember that “the best blood,” was considered to be that of the twistletons. originally there had been an absolute preference for those who could show such relationship. but as time went on it became apparent that the entire college would thus be filled with founder’s kin; and it was determined that two such only should be admitted to winchester every year, and two only sent out to fellowships at new college. even so the proportion of fellowships at the oxford college awarded to founder’s kin was large, for it was reckoned in those days that the average vacancies at new college, which were caused only by death, marriage, or the acceptance of a college living, amounted to seven in two years, of which the founder’s kin took four. and this rule operated with certain regularity. for the superannuation at eighteen did not apply to founder’s kin, who remained in the school, be their age what it might, till they went to new college.
these two boys of founder’s kin were admitted by the votes of the six electors. after them came the boy nominated by the warden of new college; then the nominee of the warden of winchester; and so on till the eighth vacancy was filled by the nominee of the junior “poser.” then a ninth vacancy was taken by the warden of new college’s second{71} nomination, and so on. of course the vacancies for winchester were much more numerous than those for the oxford college; and it often happened that the “poser’s” second or sometimes even third nomination had a very good chance of getting in in the course of the year. the cycle for “posers,” which i have mentioned, allowed it to be known who would be “poser” for a given year many years in advance; and the senior “poser’s” first nomination for 1820 had been promised to me before i was out of my cradle. he was the rev. mr. lipscomb, who subsequently became bishop of jamaica. it was written therefore in the book of fate that i was to go to winchester in the year 1820, when i should be ten years old.
that time, however, was not yet; but was looked forward to by me with a somewhat weighty sense of the inevitability of destiny. and i can well remember meditating on the three fateful epochs which awaited me—to wit, having certain teeth taken out in the immediate future; going to winchester in the paulo post futurum; and being married in the ultimate consummation of things. all three seemed to me to need being faced with a certain dogged fortitude of endurance. but i think that the terrors of the first loomed the largest in my imagination, doubtless by virtue of its greater proximity.
i remember, too, at a very early age maintaining in my own mind, if not in argument with others, that to be brave one must be very much afraid and act in despite of fear, and uninfluenced by it and{72} that not to fear at all, as i heard predicated of themselves by sundry contemporaries, indicated simply stupidity. and when the day for the dentist came my heart was in my boots, but they carried me unfalteringly to st. martin’s lane all the same.
at present, however, we are at harrow getting into my father’s new house, and establishing ourselves in our new home. it was soon arranged that i was to attend the school, scarcely, as i remember, as a regular inscribed scholar attending the lessons in the school-room, but as a private pupil of the rev. mark drury. i was about eight years old at the time; and i suppose should hardly have been accepted as an admitted member of the school.
at that time dr. butler, afterwards bishop of peterborough, was the head master. he was not the right man in the right place. he was, i take it, far more adapted for a bishop than a schoolmaster. moreover, there were certain difficulties in his position not necessarily connected with the calling of a head master. he had succeeded dr. drury in the head mastership, and he found the school full of drurys. mark, the brother of dr. drury, was the second master; a mr. evans, a respectable quiet nonentity, was the third; harry drury, a son of the old doctor, was the fourth, and was the most energetic and influential man in the place; william drury, the son of mark, was the fifth; and two young men of the names of mills and batten were the sixth and seventh masters. they were all in priests’ orders, and all received as{73} many boarders as they could get. for the objectionable system, which made the fortunes of the masters far more dependent on their trade as victuallers than on their profession as teachers, had been copied from eton, with the further evil consequence of swamping john lyon’s parochial school by the creation of a huge boarding school. this, however eminently successful, has no proper claim to be called a “public school,” save by a modern laxity of language, which has lost sight of the fact that the only meaning or possible definition of a “public school” is, one the foundation of which was intended not for a parish or other district, but for all england. if merely success, and consequent size, be held to confer a claim to the title, it is clear that there is no “private” school which would not become a “public school” to-morrow if the master and proprietor of it could command a sufficient amount of success. and even then the question would remain, what amount of success must that be?
the world in general, however, dislikes accuracy of speaking. and harrow was then, and has been since, abundantly large enough and successful enough to be called and considered a “public school” by the generality, who never take the trouble to ask themselves, what makes it such?
dr. butler was eminently a gentleman, extremely suave in manner, gentle in dealing with those under his authority, mild and moderate in his ideas of discipline, a genuinely scholarly man in tastes and{74} pursuits, though probably not what experts in such a matter would have called a profound scholar. but he had not the energetic hand needed for ruling a large school; and his rule was not a success. mark drury, though from the old drury connection his house was always full of pupils, cannot be said to have exercised any influence at all on the general condition and management of the school by reason of the extraordinary and abnormal corpulence which kept him pretty well a prisoner to the armchair in his study. he had long since, at the time when i first knew him, abandoned the practice of “going up,” as it was technically called, i.e., of climbing the last portion of harrow hill through the village street. on this topmost part of the hill are situated the church, the churchyard, and the school-house, rebuilt, enlarged, beautified, since my day; and this “going up” had to be performed by all the masters and all the boys every time school was attended. but of this climb mark drury had been incapable for many years, solely by reason of his immense corpulence. naturally a small delicately-made man, with small hands and feet, he had become in old age the fattest man i think i ever saw. he used to sit in his study, and there conduct the business of tuition, leaving to others the work of hearing lessons in school.
his house had the reputation of being the most comfortable of all the boarding houses—a fact due to the unstinting liberality, careful supervision, and {75}motherly kindness of “mother mark,” an excellent and admirable old lady, than whom it would be impossible to conceive any one more fitted for the position she occupied. the unstinting liberality, it is fair to say, characterised all the drury houses; and probably the others also. but for truly motherly care there was but one “mother mark.” “old mark” was exceedingly popular, as indeed he deserved to be, for a more kindly-natured man never existed. he had an old-fashioned belief in the virtues of the rod; and though his bodily infirmity combined with his good nature to make him sparing in the application of it, a flogging was at his hands sufficiently disagreeable to make one desirous of avoiding it. “your clock,” he would say, “requires to be wound up every monday morning,” meaning that a monday morning flogging was a good beginning of the week. but the rods were kept in a cupboard in the study—how well i remember the bluebeard-closet sort of reputation which surrounded it!—and the cupboard was always kept locked. and very often it happened that somehow or other the key was in the keeping of mrs. drury. then a message would be sent to mrs. drury for the key, and very probably the proposed patient was the messenger, in which case—and it is strange that the recurrence of the fact did not suggest suspicion to old mark—it almost invariably happened that mrs. drury was very sorry, but she could not find the key anywhere! there never surely was a key so frequently mislaid as the key of that terrible cupboard!{76}
well, it was arranged that i was to go every day to mark drury’s study, not, as i have said, as a regular member of the school, but to get such tuition as might be picked up from the genius loci, and from such personal teaching as the old man could bestow on me at moments unoccupied by his own pupils. and this arrangement, it must be understood, was entirely a matter of friendship—one incident of the many years’ friendship between my parents and all the drurys. there was no question of any honorarium in the matter.
my father’s appetite for teaching was such that he would, i am very sure, have much preferred keeping my brother and myself under his sole tuition. but he used to drive up to london in his gig daily to his chambers in lincoln’s inn, for he still struggled to hope on at his profession. (i remember that these drives down in the dark winter evenings became a source of some anxiety when a messenger travelling with despatches for the french minister, who at that time rented lord northwick’s house at harrow, was mysteriously murdered and his despatches stolen.) and it thus became necessary that some means should be found for preventing us boys from making école buissonière in the fields and under the hedgerows.
i do not think i profited much by my attendance at old mark’s pupil-room. the boys whose lessons he was hearing stood in a row in front of his armchair, and i sat behind him, supposed to be intently occupied in conning the task he had set me, in pre{77}paration for the moment, when, the class before him having been dismissed, he would have little me, all alone, in front of him for a few minutes, while another class was mustering.
how i hated it all! how very much more bitterly i hated it than i ever hated any subsequent school troubles! what a pariah i was among these denizens of mark’s and other pupil-rooms! for i was a “town boy,” “village boy” would have been a more correct designation; one of the very few, who by the terms of the founder’s will, had any right to be there at all; and was in consequence an object of scorn and contumely on the part of all the paying pupils. i was a charity boy. but at winchester subsequently i was far more of a charity boy, for william of wykeham’s foundation provided me with food and lodging as well as tuition; whereas i claimed and received nothing save a modicum of the latter at the hands of those who enjoyed and administered john lyon’s bounty. yet, though at winchester there were only seventy scholars and a hundred and thirty private pupils of the head master, or “commoners,” there was no trace whatsoever of any analogous feeling, no slightest arrogation of any superiority, social or other, on the part of the commoner over the collegian. in fact the matter was rather the other way; any difference between the son of the presumably richer man, and the presumably poorer, having been merged and lost sight of entirely in the higher scholastic dignity of the college boy.{78}
i remember also, more vividly than i could wish, the bullying to which i and others were subjected at harrow. there was much of a very brutal description. and in this respect also the difference at winchester was very marked. the theory of the two places on the subject was entirely different, with the result i have stated. at harrow, in those days—how it may be now i know not—no “fagging” was authorised or permitted by the masters. no boy had any legitimate authority over any other boy. and inasmuch as it was, is, and ever will be, in every large school impossible to achieve such a saturnian state of things, the result was that the bigger and stronger assumed an authority supported by sheer violence over the smaller and weaker. at winchester, on the other hand, the subjection of those below them in college to the “prefects” or upper class, was not only recognised but enforced by the authorities. it thus came to pass that many a big hulking fellow was subjected to the authority of a “prefect” whom he could have tossed over his head. it was an authority nobody dreamed of resisting; a matter of course; not a rule of the stronger supported by violence. and the result—contributed to, also, by other arrangements, of which i shall speak hereafter—was that anything of the nature of “bullying” was infinitely rarer at winchester than at harrow.
despite old mark’s invariable good-nature and kindness, my hours in his study were very unhappy ones; and i was hardly disposed to consider as a misfortune{79} a severe illness which attacked me and my brother henry, and for the nonce put an end to them. very shortly it became clear that we were both suffering from a bad form of typhus. how was such an attack to be accounted for? my father’s new house was visited, and examined, and found to be above suspicion. but further inquiry elicited the fact that we boys had passed a half hour before breakfast in watching the proceedings of some men engaged in cleaning and restoring an old drain connected with a neighbouring farm house. the case was clear! it would seem, however, that the proper mode of treatment was not so clear to the harrow general practitioner—a village apothecary of the old school, who, strange as it may seem, was the only available medico at harrow in those far off days. he treated us with calomel, and very, very nearly let me slip through his hands. it would have been quite, but for a fortunate chance. among our harrow friends was a mrs. edwards, the widow of a once very well known bookseller—not a publisher, but a scholarly, and indeed learned, seller of old books—who had, i believe, left her a considerable fortune. she was a highly cultured, and very clever woman, and a special friend of my mother’s. now it so happened that a dr. butt, a physician, her brother, or brother-in-law, i forget which, paid her a visit just at the time we boys were at the worst. mrs. edwards brought him to our bedsides. i was altogether unconscious, and had been raving about masters coming in at the window to drag me off to the pupil-room. my{80} knowledge of what followed therefore is derived wholly from my mother’s subsequent telling. dr. butt, having learned the treatment to which we had been subjected, said only “no more calomel, i think. let me have a glass of port wine immediately.” and with his finger on my wrist, he proceeded to administer a teaspoonful at a time of the cordial. a few more visits from dr. butt set us fairly on the way to recovery; and from that day, some sixty-eight years ago, to the present, i have never passed one day in bed from illness.
