90 PRÆTERITA-I

life to be permitted by my nurse to contemplate this judicial pond with awe, from the other side of the way. The loss of it, by the sanitary conversion of Camberwell Green into a bouquet for Camberwell’s button-hole, is to this day matter of perennial lament to me.

101. In the carrying out of the precautionary laws above described I was, of course, never allowed, on my visits to Croydon, to go out with my cousins, lest they should lead me into mischief; and no more adventurous joys were ever possible to me there, than my walks with Anne or my mother where the stream from Scarborough pond ran across the road; or on the crisp turf of Duppas Hill; my watchings of the process of my father’s drawings in Indian ink,¹ and my own untired contemplations of the pump and gutter on the other side of the so-called street, but really lane,- not more than twelve feet from wall to wall. So that, when at last it was thought that Charles, with all his good natural gifts and graces, should be brought from Croydon town to London city, and initiated into the lofty life and work of its burgess orders; and when, accordingly, he was, after various taking of counsel and making of inquiry, apprenticed to Messrs. Smith, Elder, & Co., of 65, Cornhill, with the high privilege of coming out to dine at Herne Hill every Sunday, the new and beaming presence of cousin Charles became a vivid excitement, and admirable revelation of the activities of youth to me, and I began to get really attached to him.

I was not myself the sort of creature that a boy could care much for,-or indeed any human being, except papa and mama, and Mrs. Richard Gray (of whom more presently²); being indeed nothing more than a conceited and unentertainingly troublesome little monkey. But Charles was always kind to me, and naturally answered with some cousinly or even brotherly tenderness my admiration of him, and delight in him.

¹ [See above, § 12 (p. 19).]

² [See below, pp. 100 seq., 170, 221, 247.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]