to live at a wretched tumble-down farmhouse on the second farm
he had hired! And I was taken there with him. It was nearly three
miles from Harrow, at Harrow Weald, but in the parish; and from
this house I was again sent to that school as a day-boarder. Let
those who know what is the usual appearance and what the usual
appurtenances of a boy at such a school, consider what must have
been my condition among them, with a daily walk of twelve miles
through the lanes, added to the other little troubles and labours
of a school life!

Perhaps the eighteen months which I passed in this condition,
walking to and fro on those miserably dirty lanes, was the worst
period of my life. I was now over fifteen, and had come to an age
at which I could appreciate at its full the misery of expulsion
from all social intercourse. I had not only no friends, but was
despised by all my companions. The farmhouse was not only no more
than a farmhouse, but was one of those farmhouses which seem always
to be in danger of falling into the neighbouring horse-pond. As it
crept downwards from house to stables, from stables to barns, from
barns to cowsheds, and from cowsheds to dungheaps, one could hardly
tell where one began and the other ended! There was a parlour in
which my father lived, shut up among big books; but I passed my most
jocund hours in the kitchen, making innocent love to the bailiff's
daughter. The farm kitchen might be very well through the evening,
when the horrors of the school were over; but it all added to the
cruelty of the days. A sizar at a Cambridge college, or a Bible-clerk
at Oxford, has not pleasant days, or used not to have them half a
century ago; but his position was recognised, and the misery was
measured. I was a sizar at a fashionable school, a condition never
premeditated. What right had a wretched farmer's boy, reeking from