These extraordinary excursions into science, falsely so called, occupied a large part of my time.  There was a little spare room at the back of our house, dedicated to lumber and to empty portmanteaux.  There was a table in it already, and I added a stool; this cheerless apartment now became my study.  I spent so many hours here, in solitude and without making a sound, that my Father’s curiosity, if not his suspicion, was occasionally aroused, and he would make a sudden raid on me.  I was always discovered, doubled up over the table, with my pen and ink, or else my box of colours and tumbler of turbid water by my hand, working away like a Chinese student shut up in his matriculating box.

It might have been done for a wager, if anything so simple had ever been dreamed of in our pious household.  The apparatus was slow and laboured.  In order to keep my uncouth handwriting in bounds, I was obliged to rule not lines only, but borders to my pages.  The subject did not lend itself to any flow of language, and I was obliged incessantly to borrow sentences, word for word, from my Father’s published books.  Discouraged by everyone around me, daunted by the laborious effort needful to carry out the scheme, it seems odd to me now that I persisted in so strange and wearisome an employment, but it became an absorbing passion, and was indulged in to the neglect of other lessons and other pleasures.

My Father, as the spring advanced, used to come up to the Boxroom, as my retreat was called, and hunt me out into the sunshine.  But I soon crept back to my mania.  It gave him much trouble, and Miss Marks, who thought it sheer idleness, was vociferous in objection.  She would gladly have torn up all my writings and paintings, and have set me to a useful task.  My Father, with his strong natural individualism, could not take this view.  He was interested in this strange freak of mine, and he could not wholly condemn it.  But he must have thought is a little crazy, and it is evident to me now that it led to the revolution in domestic policy by which he began to encourage any acquaintance with other young people as much as he had previously discouraged it.  He saw that I could not be allowed to spend my whole time in a little stuffy room making solemn and ridiculous imitations of Papers read before the Linnaean Society.  He was grieved, moreover, at the badness of my pictures, for I had no native skill; and he tried to teach me his own system of miniature-painting as applied to natural history.  I was forced, in deep depression of spirits, to turn from my grotesque monographs, and paint under my Father’s eye, and, from a finished drawing of his, a gorgeous tropic bird in flight.  Aided by my habit of imitation, I did at length produce some thing which might have shown promise, if it had not been wrung from me, touch by touch, pigment by pigment, under the orders of a task-master.