It was at this party at the Browns—­to which I duly went, although in sore disgrace—­that my charnel poets played me a mean trick.  It was proposed that ‘our young friends’ should give their elders the treat of repeating any pretty pieces that they knew by heart.  Accordingly a little girl recited ‘Casabianca’, and another little girl ‘We are Seven’, and various children were induced to repeat hymns, ‘some rather long’, as Calverley says, but all very mild and innocuously evangelical.  I was then asked by Mrs. Brown’s maiden sister, a gushing lady in corkscrew curls, who led the revels, whether I also would not indulge them ’by repeating some sweet stanzas’.  No one more ready than I. Without a moment’s hesitation, I stood forth, and in a loud voice I began one of my favourite passages from Blair’s ‘Grave’: 

  If death were nothing, and nought after death—­
  If when men died at once they ceased to be,—­
  Returning to the barren Womb of Nothing
  Whence first they sprung, then might the debauchee...

‘Thank you, dear, that will do nicely!’ interrupted the lady with the curls.  ‘But that’s only the beginning of it,’ I cried.  ’Yes. dear, but that will quite do!  We won’t ask you to repeat any more of it,’ and I withdrew to the borders of the company in bewilderment.  Nor did the Browns or their visitors ever learn what it was the debauchee might have said or done in more favourable circumstances.

The growing eagerness which I displayed for the society of selected schoolfellows and for such gentle dissipations as were within my reach exercised my Father greatly.  His fancy rushed forward with the pace of a steam-engine, and saw me the life and soul of a gambling club, or flaunting it at the Mabille.  He had no confidence in the action of moderating powers, and he was fond of repeating that the downward path is easy.  If one fretted to be bathing with one’s companions on the shingle, and preferred this exercise to the study of God’s Word, it was a symbol of a terrible decline, the angle of which would grow steeper and steeper, until one plunged into perdition.  He was, himself, timid and reclusive, and he shrank from all avoidable companionship with others, except on the footing of a master and teacher.  My stepmother and I, who neither taught nor ruled, yearned for a looser chain and lighter relationships.  With regard to myself, my Father about this time hit on a plan from which he hoped much, but from which little resulted.  He looked to George to supply what my temperament seemed to require of congenial juvenile companionship.

If I have not mentioned ‘George’ until now, it is not that he was a new acquaintance.  When we first came down into the country, our sympathy had been called forth by an accident to a little boy, who was knocked over by a horse, and whose thigh was broken.  Somebody (I suppose Mary Grace, since my Father could rarely bring himself to pay these public visits) went to see the child in the infirmary,