round her. I reached her without any difficulty, in perfect peace,
luxuriously, I may say, and had just begun to turn when I was
suddenly overtaken by a mad conviction that I should never get home.
There was no real danger of failure of strength, but my heart began
to beat furiously, the shore became dim, and I gave myself up for
lost. "This then is dying," I said to myself, but I also said--I
remember how vividly--"There shall be a struggle before I go down--
one desperate effort"--and I strove, in a way I cannot describe, to
bring my will to bear directly on my terror. In an instant the
horrible excitement was at an end, and THERE WAS A GREAT CALM. I
stretched my limbs leisurely, rejoicing in the sea and the sunshine.
This story is worth telling because it shows that a person with
tremulous nerves, such as mine, never ought to say that he has done
all that he can do. Notice also it was not nature or passion which
carried me through, but a conviction wrought by the reason. The
next time I was in extremity victory was tenfold easier.

In the winter, fishing and boating and swimming gave way to skating.
The meadows for miles were a great lake, and there was no need to
take off skates in order to get past mills and weirs. The bare,
flat Bedfordshire fields had also their pleasures. I had an old
flint musket which I found in an outhouse. I loaded it with hard
peas, and once killed a sparrow. The fieldfares, or felts, as we
called them, were in flocks in winter, but with them I never
succeeded. On the dark November Wednesday and Saturday afternoons,
when there was not a breath of wind, and the fog hung heavily over
the brown, ploughed furrows, we gathered sticks, lighted a fire, and
roasted potatoes. They were sweet as peaches. After dark we would
"go a bat-fowling", with lanterns, some of us on one side of the
hedge and some on the other. I left school when I was between