There was also a large cupboard where playthings must be put away when they were done with, and I remember with excitement a Homeric struggle that took place there between Martin and Arthur for the possession of a stick which was painted blue and red. But the most remarkable feature of the nursery was its walls, which, by the time we left Wellington, were entirely covered with pictures. These pictures we children used to cut out on wet days from old illustrated papers under my father’s supervision, and he, clad in a dressing-gown to defend his clothes from splashes of paste, fixed them up on the walls, till the entire surface was covered. He had a step-ladder on which he attacked the higher altitudes, and a roller with which he pressed down the affixed pictures to the wall. There were battles there and historical scenes, notable buildings, and numerous cartoons from _Punch_. But one ought never to have been put there, for I dreaded seeing it, and, like a child, kept my dread to myself. It was the outcome, I imagine, of some enquiry into sweated trades, and represented a dressmaker talking to a client and saying, “I wouldn’t disappoint your ladyship for anything,” or words to that effect. At the back was a glimpse into her workroom, and there falling backwards with closed eyes was a girl, fainting I suppose in the artist’s intention, but I knew better and was aware that she was dead. Nightmares pictured her as falling across my bed in the sleeping-nursery next door, and Beth, in her frilled nightcap came close and said, “Now, dear, go to sleep again. I’m taking care of you.” Doors in the hall led I suppose to kitchens and servants’ bedrooms, but of these I remember nothing except the fact of a flagged passage and the smell of a store-cupboard to which I once went with my mother. That part of the house did not matter. Outside, the lawn was spread round two sides of the house; if you crossed it, you found a wicket-gate in a fence that bordered the belt of trees where the gardener cast the dead adder, and through this you passed to the kitchen garden. On the right of the lawn below the trees stood a summer-house where the croquet mallets were kept, and through these trees was a path that led out into the school playing fields. A gravel sweep faced the front door; there were laburnums and rhododendrons by the gate, to the right lay the Wilderness and straight in front the College buildings with the spired chapel at the far end. Somewhere in these buildings was the school library, only notable because it contained a glass case in which was a white ant. Below the playing fields lay two immeasurable lakes, in the lower of which was the school bathing-place: the upper, though also immeasurable, was smaller, and a waterfall of gigantic height severed the two. By degrees the same world extended even further than that, for by walking laboriously you could reach either of two hills called Edgebarrow and Ambarrow, and then it was time to come home again.