In the winter, fishing and boating and swimming gave way to skating. The meadows for miles were a great lake, and there was no need to take off skates in order to get past mills and weirs. The bare, flat Bedfordshire fields had also their pleasures. I had an old flint musket which I found in an outhouse. I loaded it with hard peas, and once killed a sparrow. The fieldfares, or felts, as we called them, were in flocks in winter, but with them I never succeeded. On the dark November Wednesday and Saturday afternoons, when there was not a breath of wind, and the fog hung heavily over the brown, ploughed furrows, we gathered sticks, lighted a fire, and roasted potatoes. They were sweet as peaches. After dark we would “go a bat-fowling”, with lanterns, some of us on one side of the hedge and some on the other. I left school when I was between fourteen and fifteen, and then came the great event and the great blunder of my life, the mistake which well-nigh ruined it altogether. My mother’s brother had a son about five years older than myself, who was being trained as an Independent minister. To him I owe much. It was he who introduced me to Goethe. Some time after he was ordained, he became heterodox, and was obliged to separate himself from the Independents to whom he belonged. My mother, as I have already said, was a little weak in her preference for people who did not stand behind counters, and she desired equality with her sister-in-law. Besides, I can honestly declare that to her an Evangelical ministry was a sacred calling, and the thought that I might be the means of saving souls made her happy. Finally, it was not possible now to get a living in Bedford as a bookseller. The drawing class in the school was fairly good, and I believe I had profited by it. Anyhow, I loved drawing, and wished I might be an artist. The decision was against me, and I was handed over to a private tutor to prepare for the Countess of Huntingdon’s College at Cheshunt, which admitted students other than those which belonged to the Connexion, provided their creed did not materially differ from that which governed the Connexion trusts.