I struck a bargain with young Wakeham; I undertook to teach him to be funny in return for his teaching me this costermonger's whistle. Each of us strove conscientiously to impart knowledge. Neither of us succeeded. Wakeham tried hard to be funny; I tried hard to whistle. He did all I told him; I followed his instructions implicitly. The result was the feeblest of wit and the feeblest of whistles. “Do you think anybody would laugh at that?” Wakeham would pathetically enquire at the termination of his supremest effort. And honestly I would have to confess I did not think any living being would. “How far off do you think any one could hear that?” I would demand anxiously, on recovering sufficient breath to speak at all. “Well, it would depend upon whether you knew it was coming,” Wakeham would reply kindly, not wishing to discourage me. We abandoned the scheme by mutual consent at about the end of a fortnight. “I suppose it's something that you've got to have inside you,” I suggested to Wakeham in consolation. “I don't think the roof of your mouth can be quite the right shape for it,” concluded Wakeham. My success as story-teller, commentator, critic, jester, revived my childish ambition towards authorship. My first stirrings in this direction I cannot rightly place. I remember when very small falling into a sunk dust-bin--a deep hole, rather, into which the gardener shot his rubbish. The fall twisted my ankle so that I could not move; and the time being evening and my prison some distance from the house, my predicament loomed large before me. Yet one consolation remained with me: the incident would be of value to me in the autobiography upon which I was then engaged. I can distinctly recollect lying on my back among decaying leaves and broken glass, framing my account. “On this day a strange adventure befell me. Walking in the garden, all unheeding, I suddenly”--I did not want to add the truth--“tumbled into a dust-hole, six feet square, that any one but a moon calf might have seen.” I puzzled to evolve a more dignified situation. The dust-bin became a cavern, the entrance to which had been artfully concealed; the six or seven feet I had really fallen, “an endless descent, terminating in a vast and gloomy chamber.” I was divided between opposing desires: One, for rescue followed by sympathy and supper; the other, for the alarming experience of a night of terror where I lay. Nature conquering Art, I yelled; and the episode terminated prosaically with a warm bath and arnica. But from it I judge that desire for the woes and perils of authorship was with me somewhat early.