till Saturday of every week; but when called upon to confront his first
five days of banishment he felt sure that he would not survive them. A
leaden cistern belonging to the school had in, or outside it, the raised
image of a face. He chose the cistern for his place of burial, and
converted the face into his epitaph by passing his hand over and over it
to a continuous chant of: 'In memory of unhappy Browning'--the ceremony
being renewed in his spare moments, till the acute stage of the feeling
had passed away.

The fondness for animals for which through life he was noted, was
conspicuous in his very earliest days. His urgent demand for 'something
to do' would constantly include 'something to be caught' for him: 'they
were to catch him an eft;' 'they were to catch him a frog.' He would
refuse to take his medicine unless bribed by the gift of a speckled frog
from among the strawberries; and the maternal parasol, hovering above
the strawberry bed during the search for this object of his desires,
remained a standing picture in his remembrance. But the love of the
uncommon was already asserting itself; and one of his very juvenile
projects was a collection of rare creatures, the first contribution to
which was a couple of lady-birds, picked up one winter's day on a wall
and immediately consigned to a box lined with cotton-wool, and labelled,
'Animals found surviving in the depths of a severe winter.' Nor did
curiosity in this case weaken the power of sympathy. His passion for
birds and beasts was the counterpart of his father's love of children,
only displaying itself before the age at which child-love naturally
appears. His mother used to read Croxall's Fables to his little sister
and him. The story contained in them of a lion who was kicked to death
by an ass affected him so painfully that he could no longer endure the
sight of the book; and as he dared not destroy it, he buried it between
the stuffing and the woodwork of an old dining-room chair, where it