The recollections of boyhood, so far as week-days go, are very happy. Sunday, however, was not happy. I was taken to a religious service, morning and evening, and understood nothing. The evening was particularly trying. The windows of the meeting-house streamed inside with condensed breath, and the air we took into our lungs was poisonous. Almost every Sunday some woman was carried out fainting. Do what I could it was impossible to keep awake. When I was quite little I was made to stand on the seat, a spectacle, with other children in the like case, to the whole congregation, and I often nearly fell down, overcome with drowsiness. My weakness much troubled me, because, although it might not be a heinous sin, such as bathing on Sunday, it showed that I was not one of God’s children, like Samuel, who ministered before the Lord girded with a linen ephod. Bathing on Sunday, as the river was always before me, was particularly prominent as a type of wickedness, and I read in some book for children, by a certain divine named Todd, how a wicked boy, bathing on the Sabbath, was drawn under a mill-wheel, was drowned, and went to hell. I wish I could find that book, for there was also in it a most conclusive argument intended for a child’s mind against the doctrine, propounded by people called philosophers, that the world was created by chance. The refutation was in the shape of a dream by a certain sage representing a world made by Chance and not by God. Unhappily all that I recollect of the remarkable universe thus produced is that the geese had hoofs, and “clamped about like horses”. Such was the awful consequence of creation by a No-God or nothing. [Picture: The School, Bedford, as it was in 1831] In 1841 or 1842—I forget exactly the date—I was sent to what is now the Modern School. My father would not let me go to the Grammar School, partly because he had such dreadful recollections of his treatment there, and partly because in those days the universities were closed to Dissenters. The Latin and Greek in the upper school were not good for much, but Latin in the lower school—Greek was not taught—consisted almost entirely in learning the Eton Latin grammar by heart, and construing Cornelius Nepos. The boys in the lower school were a very rough set. About a dozen were better than the others, and kept themselves apart.