The first thing I can really see is the coronation of Queen Victoria and a town’s dinner in St. Paul’s Square. About this time, or soon after, I was placed in a “young ladies’” school. At the front door of this polite seminary I appeared one morning in a wheelbarrow. I had persuaded a shop boy to give me a lift. It was when I was about ten years old—surely it must have been very early on some cloudless summer morning—that Nurse Jane came to us. She was a faithful servant and a dear friend for many years—I cannot say how many. Till her death, not so long ago, I was always her “dear boy”. She was as familiar with me as if I were her own child. She left us when she married, but came back on her husband’s death. Her father and mother lived in a little thatched cottage at Oakley. They were very poor, but her mother was a Scotch girl, and knew how to make a little go a long way. Jane had not infrequent holidays, and she almost always took my sister and myself to spend them at Oakley. This was a delight as keen as any which could be given me. No entertainment, no special food was provided. As to entertainment there was just the escape to a freer life, to a room in which we cooked our food, ate it, and altogether lived during waking hours when we were indoors. Oh, for a house with this one room, a Homeric house! How much easier and how much more natural should we be if we watched the pot or peeled the potatoes as we talked, than it is now in a drawing-room, where we do not know what chair to choose amongst a dozen scattered about aimlessly; where there is no table to hide the legs or support the arms; a room which compels an uncomfortable awkwardness, and forced conversation. Would it not be more sincere if a saucepan took part in it than it is now, when, in evening clothes, tea-cup in hand, we discuss the show at the Royal Academy, while a lady at the piano sings a song from _Aida_?