As regards intelligence, we were in a poor way. On Saturdays _The Suffolk Chronicle_ appeared, much to the delight of the Radicals, while the Tories were cheered by _The Ipswich Journal_. At a later time _The Patriot_ came to our house, and we got an idea of what was going on in the religious and Dissenting world. Foster’s Essays were to be seen on many shelves, and later on the literary and religious speculations of Isaac Taylor, of Ongar, and Dick’s writings had also a wonderful sale. I fancy no one cares much now for any of the writers I have named. Such is fame! As a boy it seemed to me I had too much of the Assembly’s Catechism and Virgil, to whose poetic beauties I was somewhat blind. I resolved to run away, as I fancied there was something better and brighter than village life. Religion was not attractive to me. Sunday was irksome. The land was barren, from Dan to Beersheba. I longed for the conflict and excitement and life of the distant town, and I ran away unconscious of the pain I should inflict on parents I dearly loved. Oh, that running away! If I live—and there is little chance of that—to the age of Methuselah I shall never forget it! It took place in the early morn of a long summer’s day. The whole scene rises distinctly before me. I see myself giving a note to my sister for father and mother when they came down to breakfast, I see myself casting an eye to the bedroom window to see if there was any chance of their being up and so stopping the enterprise on which I had set my mind. Happily, as I thought, the blinds were down and there was nothing to forbid my opening the garden gate and finding myself on the London road. I was anxious to be off and yet loth to leave. I had a small parcel under my arm, consisting of very small belongings; and I was free of Latin and the Assembly Catechism, free as the air—my own master. All the world was hushed in slumber. There was no one to stop me or bid me return to the roof where I had been happy, and to the parents whom I was to return to, to love more than I had ever done before, and whom it then saddened me to think that I might never see again. Not a soul was in the street, and the few shops which adorned it were shut up—cottagers and shopkeepers, they were all in the arms of Morpheus. I hastened on, not wishing to be seen by any one; but there was no fear of that, only cows, horses at grass, and pigs and hens and birds were conscious of my flight, and they regarded me with the indifference with which a Hottentot would view an ape. In my path was a hill on which I stayed awhile to take a last look at the deserted village. The white smoke was then curling up from the chimneys and the common round of daily life was about to begin. How peaceful it all seemed. What a contrast to my beating heart! There was not one of those cottages behind into which I had not been with my father as he visited the poor and the afflicted—not a lane or street along which I had not