To us in that Suffolk village the sports of big schools and more ambitious lads were unknown. For us there was no cricket or football, except on rare occasions, when we had an importation of juveniles in the house, but I don’t know that we were much the better for that. We trundled the hoop, and raced one with another, and that is capital exercise. We played hopscotch, which is good training for the calves of the legs. We had bows and arrows and stilts, and in the autumn—when we could get into the fields—we built and flew kites, kites which we had to make ourselves. If there was an ancient sandpit in the neighbourhood how we loved to explore its depths, and climb its heights, and in the freshness of the early spring what a joy it was to explore the hedges, or the trees of the neighbouring park, when the gamekeepers happened to be out of sight in search of birds’ nests and eggs; and in the long winter evenings what a delight it was to read of the past, though it was in the dry pages of Rollin, or to glow over the poems of Cowper. We were, it is true, a serious family. We had family prayers. No wine but that known as gingerbeer honoured the paternal hospitable board. Grog I never saw in any shape. A bit of gingerbread and a glass of water formed our evening meal. Oh, at Christmas what games we had of snap-dragon and blind man’s buff. I always felt small when a boy from Cockneydom appeared amongst us, and that I hold to be the chief drawback of such a bringing up as ours was. The battle of life is best fought by the cheeky. It does not do to be too humble and retiring. Baron Trench owned to a too great consciousness of innate worth. It gave him, he writes, a too great degree of pride. That is bad, but not so bad as the reverse—that feeling of humility which withers up all the noblest aspirations of the soul, and which I possessed partly from religion, and partly from the feeling that, as a Dissenter, I was a social Pariah in the eyes of the generation around. My modesty, I own, has been in my way all through life. The world takes a man at his own valuation. It is too busy to examine each particular claim, and the prize is won by him who most loudly and pertinaciously blows his own trumpet. At any rate, in our Suffolk home we enjoyed Lively cheer of vigour born; The thoughtless day—the easy night— The spirits pure—the slumbers light— That fly the approach of morn.