said, ’those testimonies to the Blood of Christ, the fruits of her pen, began to be spread very widely, even to the most distant parts of the globe’.  My Father, too, was at this time at the height of his activity.  After breakfast, each of them was amply occupied, perhaps until night-fall; our evenings we still always spent together.  Sometimes my Mother took me with her on her ‘unknown day’s employ’; I recollect pleasant rambles through the City by her side, and the act of looking up at her figure soaring above me.  But when all was done, I had hours and hours of complete solitude, in my Father’s study, in the back-garden, above all in the garret.

The garret was a fairy place.  It was a low lean-to, lighted from the roof.  It was wholly unfurnished, except for two objects, an ancient hat-box and a still more ancient skin-trunk.  The hat-box puzzled me extremely, till one day, asking my Father what it was, I got a distracted answer which led me to believe that it was itself a sort of hat, and I made a laborious but repeated effort to wear it.  The skin-trunk was absolutely empty, but the inside of the lid of it was lined with sheets of what I now know to have been a sensational novel.  It was, of course, a fragment, but I read it, kneeling on the bare floor, with indescribable rapture.  It will be recollected that the idea of fiction, of a deliberately invented story, had been kept from me with entire success.  I therefore implicitly believed the tale in the lid of the trunk to be a true account of the sorrows of a lady of title, who had to flee the country, and who was pursued into foreign lands by enemies bent upon her ruin.  Somebody had an interview with a ‘minion’ in a ‘mask’; I went downstairs and looked up these words in Bailey’s ‘English Dictionary’, but was left in darkness as to what they had to do with the lady of title.  This ridiculous fragment filled me with delicious fears; I fancied that my Mother, who was out so much, might be threatened by dangers of the same sort; and the fact that the narrative came abruptly to an end, in the middle of one of its most thrilling sentences, wound me up almost to a disorder of wonder and romance.

The preoccupation of my parents threw me more and more upon my own resources.  But what are the resources of a solitary child of six?  I was never inclined to make friends with servants, nor did our successive maids proffer, so far as I recollect, any advances.  Perhaps, with my ‘dedication’ and my grown-up ways of talking, I did not seem to them at all an attractive little boy.  I continued to have no companions, or even acquaintances of my own age.  I am unable to recollect exchanging two words with another child till after my Mother’s death.