My father’s income was not more than eight or nine hundred a year, and his expenses were heavy, but nevertheless my mother determined that I should go to the university, and I was accordingly sent to a grammar school. I had not been there more than three years, and was barely fourteen years old, when my father was pitched out of his gig and killed. He had insured his life for two thousand pounds, which was as much as he could afford, and my mother had another two thousand pounds of her own. Her income therefore was less than two hundred a year. She could not teach, she would not let lodgings, nor was she wanted at the Park. She therefore took a cottage, small but genteel, at a rental of ten pounds a year, and managed as best she could. The furniture was partly sold, but the regimental portrait was saved. Unhappily, as the cottage ceilings were very low, it was not an easy task to hang it. The only place to be found for it, out of the way of the chairs, was opposite the window, in a parlour about twelve feet square, called the drawing-room; but it was too long even there, and my great-uncle’s legs descended behind the sofa, and could not be seen unless it was moved. ‘The cottage is a shocking come-down,’ said my mother to the rector, ‘but it is not vulgar; it is at least a place in which a lady can live.’ Of course the university was now out of the question, and at fifteen I left school. I had read a little Virgil, a little Horace, and a book or two of Homer. I had also got through the first six books of Euclid after a fashion, and had advanced as far as quadratic equations in algebra, but had no mathematical talent whatever. My mother would not hear of trade as an occupation for me, and she could not afford to make me a soldier, sailor, doctor, lawyer, or parson. At last the county member, at the request of her father, obtained for me a clerkship in the Stamps and Taxes Department. These were the days before competitive examinations. She was now able to say that her son was in H. M. Civil Service. I had eighty pounds a year, and lodged at Clapton with an aunt, my father’s sister. Although I had been only half-educated, I was fond of reading, and I had plenty of time for it. I read good books, and read them with enthusiasm. I was much taken with the Greek dramatists, especially with Euripides, but my only means of access to them was through translations. My aunt had another nephew who came to see her now and then. He had obtained an open exhibition at Oxford, and one day I found that he had a Greek Euripides in his pocket, and that he needed little help from a dictionary. He sometimes brought with him a college friend, and well do I remember a sneer from this gentleman about the poor creatures whose acquaintance with Æschylus was derived from Potter. I did not look at a translation again for some time.