The two years which followed were passed in a house in Birchin Lane, where the Sierra Leone Company had its office.  The only place where the child could be taken for exercise, and what might be called air, was Drapers’ Gardens, which (already under sentence to be covered with bricks and mortar at an early date) lies behind Throgmorton Street, and within a hundred yards of the Stock Exchange.  To this dismal yard, containing as much gravel as grass, and frowned upon by a board of Rules and Regulations almost as large as itself, his mother used to convoy the nurse and the little boy through the crowds that towards noon swarmed along Cornhill and Threadneedle Street; and thither she would return, after a due interval, to escort them back to Birchin Lane.  So strong was the power of association upon Macaulay’s mind that in after years Drapers’ Garden was among his favourite haunts.  Indeed, his habit of roaming for hours through and through the heart of the City, (a habit that never left him as long as he could roam at all,) was due in part to the recollection which caused him to regard that region as native ground.

Baby as he was when he quitted it, he retained some impression of his earliest home.  He remembered standing up at the nursery window by his father’s side, looking at a cloud of black smoke pouring out of a tall chimney.  He asked if that was hell; an inquiry that was received with a grave displeasure which at the time he could not understand.  The kindly father must have been pained, almost against his own will, at finding what feature of his creed it was that had embodied itself in so very material a shape before his little son’s imagination.  When in after days Mrs. Macaulay was questioned as to how soon she began to detect in the child a promise of the future, she used to say that his sensibilities and affections were remarkably developed at an age which to her hearers appeared next to incredible.  He would cry for joy on seeing her after a few hours’ absence, and, (till her husband put a stop to it,) her power of exciting his feelings was often made an exhibition to her friends.  She did not regard this precocity as a proof of cleverness; but, like a foolish young mother, only thought that so tender a nature was marked for early death.

The next move which the family made was into as healthy an atmosphere, in every sense, as the most careful parent could wish to select.  Mr. Macaulay took a house in the High Street of Clapham, in the part now called the Pavement, on the same side as the Plough inn, but some doors nearer to the Common.  It was a roomy comfortable dwelling, with a very small garden behind, and in front a very small one indeed, which has entirely disappeared beneath a large shop thrown out towards the road-way by the present occupier, who bears the name of Heywood.  Here the boy passed a quiet and most happy childhood.  From the time that he was three years old he read incessantly, for the most part lying on the rug before the fire, with