Nervous, self-conscious, and irritable, he took no pleasure in outdoor games, and at the earliest possible age was busy with books. With their aid he lived in a world of his own, a world peopled with the heroes and heroines who dwell between book covers. By the time he was six years of age he had read the _Arabian Nights' Entertainments_, and though it was certainly an abridged version in a single volume, there is no doubt that it must have provided a powerful and unhealthy stimulant to an imagination already far too active. Happily his father found that these books were dangerous to his youngest born, and destroyed them. The boy entered the grammar school, where he speedily passed all the other lads of his age. For the next three years the life at Ottery St. Mary continued in the seemingly peaceful fashion that was in reality so harmful. The little lad was disliked by his school-fellows and flattered and petted by his elders. His father took him seriously enough to pave the way, by a series of discourses, for the service of the Church. His mother's friends delighted in exhibitions of his precocity. His temper, sometimes sullen and perverse, showed itself disastrously on one occasion, when he ran away from home to avoid some punishment, doubtless well earned, and slept all night by the banks of the river that gives its name to his home. He woke so exhausted that his rescuer was obliged to carry him home. To this escapade he attributed the fits of ague to which he was subject for many following years.