and trousers were soaked, and we had to lie on the grass in the
broiling sun without a rag on us till everything was dry again.

In winter our joys were of a different kind but none the less
delightful. If it was a frost, we had skating; not like skating on a
London pond, but over long reaches, and if the locks had not
intervened, we might have gone a day's journey on the ice without a
stoppage. If there was no ice, we had football, and what was still
better, we could get up a steeplechase--on foot straight across hedge
and ditch.

In after-years, when I lived in London, I came to know children who
went to school in Gower Street, and travelled backwards and forwards by
omnibus--children who had no other recreation than an occasional visit
to the Zoological Gardens, or a somewhat sombre walk up to Hampstead to
see their aunt; and I have often regretted that they never had any
experience of those perfect poetic pleasures which the boy enjoys whose
childhood is spent in the country, and whose home is there. A country
boarding-school is something altogether different.

On the Sundays, however, the compensation came. It was a season of
unmixed gloom. My father and mother were rigid Calvinistic
Independents, and on that day no newspaper nor any book more secular
than the Evangelical Magazine was tolerated. Every preparation for the
Sabbath had been made on the Saturday, to avoid as much as possible any
work. The meat was cooked beforehand, so that we never had a hot
dinner even in the coldest weather; the only thing hot which was
permitted was a boiled suet pudding, which cooked itself while we were
at chapel, and some potatoes which were prepared after we came home.
Not a letter was opened unless it was clearly evident that it was not