V. PARNASSUS AND PLYNLIMMON 89

heart, not wanting in common sense, or even in good sense; and affectionate, like all the rest. He took to his schooling kindly, and became grammatical, polite, and presentable in our high Herne Hill circle. His elder brother, John, had taken care of his education in more important matters: very early in the child’s life he put him on a barebacked pony, with the simple elementary instruction that he should be thrashed if he came off. And he stayed on. Similarly, for first lesson in swimming, he pitched the boy like a pebble into the middle of the Croydon Canal, jumping in, of course, after him; but I believe the lad squattered to the bank without help, and became when he was only “that high” a fearless master of horse and wave.

100. My mother used to tell these two stories with the greater satisfaction, because, in her own son’s education, she had sacrificed her pride in his heroism to her anxiety for his safety; and never allowed me to go to the edge of a pond, or be in the same field with a pony. As ill-luck also would have it, there was no manner of farm or marsh near us, which might of necessity modify these restrictions; but I have already noted¹ with thankfulness the good I got out of the tadpole-haunted ditch in Croxted Lane; while also, even between us and tutorial Walworth,² there was one Elysian field for me in the neglected grass of Camberwell Green. There was a pond in the corner of it, of considerable size, and unknown depth,-probably, even in summer, full three feet in the middle; the sable opacity of its waters adding to the mystery of danger. Large, as I said, for a pond, perhaps sixty or seventy yards the long way of the Green, fifty the short; while on its western edge grew a stately elm, from whose boughs, it was currently reported, and conscientiously believed, a wicked boy had fallen into the pond on Sunday, and forthwith the soul of him into a deeper and darker pool.

It was one of the most valued privileges of my early

¹ [In Fiction, Fair and Foul (Nineteenth Century, June 1880), § 1: see Vol. XXXIV. p. 265.]

² [Tutorial, as the home of Dr. Andrews: see above, p. 71.]

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