One adventure in these days of his childhood impressed itself most deeply on his memory. His father, who had gone one day on business to a town some miles off, was very late in returning. His mother became uneasy, and set off quite alone to meet her husband. Soon after she had started, he returned, but though he had come by the way along which she had gone, he had not met her. He in his turn was full of alarm. He sent off his eldest boy, a lad of nine, in one direction. The two next boys, Edwin and Rowland, who were at most eight and six years old, he bade go by one road to Wolverhampton, and come back by another. He himself took a third way. The boys set out, not indeed without fear, but nevertheless “with a conviction that the work must be done.” The two younger lads had first to go along a dark lane. They then came to a spot where, underneath the cross-ways, there lay buried, as they knew, the body of a lad who had ended his life with his own hand. The place was known as Dead Boy’s Grave. Next they had to pass near the brink of a gravel pit, “to them an awful chasm, which they shuddered by as they could.” At length they made their round, and not far off midnight, as Rowland believed, reached home. There to their great joy they found the rest gathered together. The eldest boy, who had been alone, though a lad of great courage, had suffered not a little from fear. Neither he, nor his father, had met the mother, who reached home before them. As she had been going along the lane, she had been alarmed, she said, by a man who started up on the other side of the hedge. In her fright she had cleared the opposite fence at a bound, and had made her way home over the fields. The next day her husband went with her to the spot, but though he was an active and muscular man, he failed to make in his strength the leap which she had made in the terror which comes from weakness.