any time. This was not a superstitious dread of apparitions; but the
association of ideas brought back the past with a clearness that was
extremely painful. Even now, at a distance of more than forty years, I
avoid whatever reminds me of that time, and am not sorry that this
narrative now leads to something else.

My father had no great affection for his brothers, who on their part
could not have much esteem for him, so there was a mutual coolness which
prevented him from appointing either of them to be my guardian. Probably
they felt this as a slight, for, although always kind to me, they held
completely aloof from anything like paternal interference with my
education. My father had named his eldest sister, Mary, as my sole
guardian, with, two lawyers as co-executors with her. The reader will
probably think it was a mistake to appoint an old maid to be guardian to
a boy; but my aunt was a woman of excellent sense, and certainly not
disposed to bring me up effeminately; indeed, her willingness to
encourage me in everything manly was such that she would always inflict
upon herself considerable anxiety about my safety rather than prevent me
from taking my full share of the more or less perilous exercises of
youth. As to my education and profession her scheme was very simple and
clear, and would have been perfectly rational if I had been all that she
wished me to be. According to her plan I was to go to good schools
first, and then be prepared for Oxford by tutors, and become a
clergyman. There was some thought at one time of sending me to one of
the great public schools; but this was abandoned, and I was first sent
to Burnley School again, and then, after the summer holidays of 1845, to
Doncaster, where I was a boarder in the house of the head-master.

A word from me in favor of one of the public schools would probably have
decided my guardian to send me there; but there was a _vis inertiae_ in