sloped down one side of the hill, and was filled with the most delightful old trees, fir and laurel, may, mulberry, hazel, apple, pear, and damson, not to mention currant and gooseberry bushes innumerable, and large strawberry beds spreading down the sunny slopes.  There was not a tree there that I did not climb, and one, a widespreading Portugal laurel, was my private country house.  I had there my bedroom and my sitting-rooms, my study, and my larder.  The larder was supplied by the fruit-trees, from which I was free to pick as I would, and in the study I would sit for hours with some favourite book—­Milton’s “Paradise Lost” the chief favourite of all.  The birds must often have felt startled, when from the small swinging form perching on a branch, came out in childish tones the “Thrones, dominations, princedoms, virtues, powers,” of Milton’s stately and sonorous verse.  I liked to personify Satan, and to declaim the grand speeches of the hero-rebel, and many a happy hour did I pass in Milton’s heaven and hell, with for companions Satan and “the Son,” Gabriel and Abdiel.  Then there was a terrace running by the side of the churchyard, always dry in the wettest weather, and bordered by an old wooden fence, over which clambered roses of every shade; never was such a garden for roses as that of the Old Vicarage.  At the end of the terrace was a little summer-house, and in this a trap-door in the fence, which swung open and displayed one of the fairest views in England.  Sheer from your feet downwards went the hill, and then far below stretched the wooded country till your eye reached the towers of Windsor Castle, far away on the horizon.  It was the view at which Byron was never tired of gazing, as he lay on the flat tombstone close by—­Byron’s tomb, as it is still called—­of which he wrote:—­

  “Again I behold where for hours I have pondered,
     As reclining, at eve, on yon tombstone I lay,
  Or round the steep brow of the churchyard I wandered,
     To catch the last gleam of the sun’s setting ray.”

Reader mine, if ever you go to Harrow, ask permission to enter the old garden, and try the effect of that sudden burst of beauty, as you swing back the small trap-door at the terrace end.

Into this house we moved on my eighth birthday, and for eleven years it was “home” to me, left always with regret, returned to always with joy.

Almost immediately afterwards I left my mother for the first time; for one day, visiting a family who lived close by, I found a stranger sitting in the drawing-room, a lame lady with a strong face, which softened marvellously as she smiled at the child who came dancing in; she called me to her presently, and took me on her lap and talked to me, and on the following day our friend came to see my mother, to ask if she would let me go away and be educated with this lady’s niece, coming home for the holidays regularly, but leaving my education in her hands.  At first my