general election in 1832, to which I have referred. My cradle--as I
have been told--had to be carried from the front bedroom into the
back, so that my head might not be broken by the stones which
smashed the windows.

The first thing I can really see is the coronation of Queen Victoria
and a town's dinner in St. Paul's Square. About this time, or soon
after, I was placed in a "young ladies'" school. At the front door
of this polite seminary I appeared one morning in a wheelbarrow. I
had persuaded a shop boy to give me a lift.

It was when I was about ten years old--surely it must have been very
early on some cloudless summer morning--that Nurse Jane came to us.
She was a faithful servant and a dear friend for many years--I
cannot say how many. Till her death, not so long ago, I was always
her "dear boy". She was as familiar with me as if I were her own
child. She left us when she married, but came back on her husband's
death. Her father and mother lived in a little thatched cottage at
Oakley. They were very poor, but her mother was a Scotch girl, and
knew how to make a little go a long way. Jane had not infrequent
holidays, and she almost always took my sister and myself to spend
them at Oakley. This was a delight as keen as any which could be
given me. No entertainment, no special food was provided. As to
entertainment there was just the escape to a freer life, to a room
in which we cooked our food, ate it, and altogether lived during
waking hours when we were indoors. Oh, for a house with this one
room, a Homeric house! How much easier and how much more natural
should we be if we watched the pot or peeled the potatoes as we
talked, than it is now in a drawing-room, where we do not know what
chair to choose amongst a dozen scattered about aimlessly; where