But to me personally there was this added penalty, that when I returned from each such woful debauch, like a stricken soldier from the field, I was compelled to endure without defence the reproachful glance of my nurse’s eye, which told me as clearly as though it were written upon the wall that I had but earned the appointed wages of sin. This nurse of mine was in many ways a remarkable character. Linked with a nature surely the most loving and affectionate that a child could desire, were the sternest principles of religion and morality ever implanted in the human breast--principles associated with so slender a store of intellectual endowment that even to my childish mind their vehement announcement was sometimes grotesque. One of her most deeply rooted convictions was that the principle of life insurance was a direct defiance of the laws of God: a proposition which she sought to establish by a terrible tale of a butcher of Lewes, who, having flouted Providence by affecting an insurance upon his life, within half an hour after the conclusion of this prudent operation fell down dead as he descended the steps of the market-hall. Her intellectual equipment was perhaps no scantier than that of many other women, but the fervour with which she employed it in the service of her religious principles might have made her a desolating influence upon the life of a child, if her loving and kindly nature had not constantly given the lie to the rigid creed she innocently believed was guiding her conduct through life. It is undeniable, however, that such influences first exercised in childhood are long remembered, and it was many a day before I could quite free myself from the thought that the study of dramatic art was not in some degree associated with a sinful life. It is difficult to say whether this hovering sense of wrong-doing is not in its nature an added incentive to enjoyment. Certain it is that the pleasures of the play-house became a factor of increasing influence in my life. There was an old laundry attached to our house at Barnes which seemed to us singularly unfitted for its destined purpose, but which might, as we thought, be easily adapted as an arena for the performance of stage plays, and here, urged on by a wicked cousin who has since, as a fitting penalty for his youthful delinquencies, become a clergyman, I began my career as an amateur actor. We had at that time a distrust of all feminine help, and chose for our essays in histrionic art only those plays in Lacy’s list wherein the plot might be expounded by the exclusive support of male performers. It chanced, while I was at Bruce Castle School, I had for one of my comrades poor Dick Bateman, son of Richard Bateman, who had about that time, or soon after, become Irving’s manager at the Lyceum. Together we became editors of a school magazine, and it was through him afterwards that I won my first introduction to the theatre.