A trip to Clapham was quite an undertaking, as there were no means of getting there but by walking. Once a year I used to go with the mother to pay the ground rent. We had to start after an early dinner and walk over Battersea Bridge along the road, with fields on each side to the top of Surrey Lane, pass Weller’s Farm, and strike off to the left by a pathway through cornfields to Long Hedge Farm—where the Chatham and Dover works now stand—and pass through some water meadows with bridges of planks across the dikes and penstocks, and up the hill by the side of some old cottages that brought you out in the Wandsworth Road; across a narrow footpath, a steep hill with steps cut in the gravel, called Matrimony Hill, and through the old churchyard. A few doors to the left was a ladies’ school,—our destination. The lady we were to see was a Miss Hart, a parlour boarder there. We were regaled with biscuits and a glass of currant wine, which we quite appreciated, to help us on our way home. CHAPTER 2.—Schoolboy Escapades. In Smith Street, at the corner of Durham Mews, stood Durham House School, a large, square, rambling old building, without any pretence to architectural design, apparently built at different times. It contained over forty rooms and dormitories, with a large playground at the back extending the whole length of the mews. It was strictly a boarding school, and must have had nearly one hundred boys training for Eton and Harrow and the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, mostly the sons of the aristocracy and the leading families. Some of our most eminent men were trained there. Some of the younger boys on the fourth form were allowed out with the usher on the Wednesday afternoons in the summer time, from two till six, to wander in the fields and lanes to gather wild flowers and to receive instruction in botany. I became acquainted with them at the tuck shop in Queen Street, kept by an old crippled shoemaker, where we used to gamble for sweets by an apparatus called a “doley.” You dropped a marble down a spiral column on to a tray at the bottom with a lot of indents for the marble to lodge in, all numbered, and the highest number took the prize.