the most distant parts of the globe'. My Father, too, was at this
time at the height of his activity. After breakfast, each of them
was amply occupied, perhaps until night-fall; our evenings we
still always spent together. Sometimes my Mother took me with her
on her 'unknown day's employ'; I recollect pleasant rambles
through the City by her side, and the act of looking up at her
figure soaring above me. But when all was done, I had hours and
hours of complete solitude, in my Father's study, in the back-
garden, above all in the garret.

The garret was a fairy place. It was a low lean-to, lighted from
the roof. It was wholly unfurnished, except for two objects, an
ancient hat-box and a still more ancient skin-trunk. The hat-box
puzzled me extremely, till one day, asking my Father what it was,
I got a distracted answer which led me to believe that it was
itself a sort of hat, and I made a laborious but repeated effort
to wear it. The skin-trunk was absolutely empty, but the inside
of the lid of it was lined with sheets of what I now know to have
been a sensational novel. It was, of course, a fragment, but I
read it, kneeling on the bare floor, with indescribable rapture.
It will be recollected that the idea of fiction, of a
deliberately invented story, had been kept from me with entire
success. I therefore implicitly believed the tale in the lid of
the trunk to be a true account of the sorrows of a lady of title,
who had to flee the country, and who was pursued into foreign
lands by enemies bent upon her ruin. Somebody had an interview
with a 'minion' in a 'mask'; I went downstairs and looked up
these words in Bailey's 'English Dictionary', but was left in
darkness as to what they had to do with the lady of title. This
ridiculous fragment filled me with delicious fears; I fancied