children, like Samuel, who ministered before the Lord girded with a
linen ephod. Bathing on Sunday, as the river was always before me,
was particularly prominent as a type of wickedness, and I read in
some book for children, by a certain divine named Todd, how a wicked
boy, bathing on the Sabbath, was drawn under a mill-wheel, was
drowned, and went to hell. I wish I could find that book, for there
was also in it a most conclusive argument intended for a child's
mind against the doctrine, propounded by people called philosophers,
that the world was created by chance. The refutation was in the
shape of a dream by a certain sage representing a world made by
Chance and not by God. Unhappily all that I recollect of the
remarkable universe thus produced is that the geese had hoofs, and
"clamped about like horses". Such was the awful consequence of
creation by a No-God or nothing.

In 1841 or 1842--I forget exactly the date--I was sent to what is
now the Modern School. My father would not let me go to the Grammar
School, partly because he had such dreadful recollections of his
treatment there, and partly because in those days the universities
were closed to Dissenters. The Latin and Greek in the upper school
were not good for much, but Latin in the lower school--Greek was not
taught--consisted almost entirely in learning the Eton Latin grammar
by heart, and construing Cornelius Nepos. The boys in the lower
school were a very rough set. About a dozen were better than the
others, and kept themselves apart.

The recollections of school are not interesting to me in any way,
but it is altogether otherwise with playtime and holidays. School
began at seven in the morning during half the year, but later in
winter. At half-past eight or nine there was an interval of an hour