How vividly, especially in childhood, the tragedies we undergo inwardly print on our minds the recollection of the scenes in which we experienced them! I must often have travelled by train before, yet this was the first railway journey of my life which has left me any recollection of it. It took me but two hours to reach the heart of Berkshire (for this was in the days when the railway was still used for quick travel, and the private companies, often in competition with one another, used to run trains at what we should consider breakneck speed), but those two hours seemed to me like a Purgatory. And yet, in a calmer mood, the scenery at which I peered out through the carriage windows would have seemed beautiful enough. As soon as you passed Maidenhead you were in the country; the leaves were just beginning to turn with the autumn along the comfortable, purposeless banks of the full-fed Thames; to give place, once Twyford was reached, to the burning regiments of dahlias and early chrysanthemums that fringed Sutton’s seed-grounds. Only as we slowed down through the smoky suburbs of Didcot did we slacken speed; and then on again into the Downs, with the spell-stricken glamour of their mysterious repose. At Challow I crept out, a woe-begone little figure, on to the platform, and faced the huge effort of daring which I needed to intercept a porter and ask him to take my luggage out—a necessary expense, for of course we used to take our own linen about with us, and our heavy trunks had to be committed to the care of the guard. The porter was a less formidable character than my fears had painted him, and when I had paid up my two shillings wished me “Good afternoon” with the old-world courtesy of the time.