The longest day’s walk I ever did was forty-seven miles, but I carried a very heavy knapsack, making, I take it, that distance fully equal to sixty miles without one. How well I remember walking one fair frosty morning from Winchester to Alresford, seven miles, before breakfast. I asked at the inn at which I breakfasted for cold meat. They brought me an uncut loin of small Southdown mutton, of which I ate the whole. And I can see now the glance of that waiter’s eye, accusing me, as plainly as if he had spoken the words, of pocketing his master’s provisions! _Eheu! fugaces, Posthume, Posthume, labuntur anni_, and I never shall again eat a loin of mutton at one sitting!--partly though because scientific breeding has exterminated the good old Southdown mutton. One other reminiscence occurs to me in connection with the subject of walking. While I was living with my parents at Harrow, my mother’s brother, Mr. Henry Milton, was living with his family at Fulham. And one Sunday morning I walked from Harrow to Fulham before breakfast on a visit to him. As may be supposed, I was abundantly ready to do ample justice to the very solid and varied breakfast placed before me, but, after having done so, was hardly equally ready to accompany my uncle’s family to Fulham Church to hear the Bishop of London preach. This, however, it behoved me to do, not without great misgiving as to the effect that the Bishop’s sermon might have on me after my twelve miles walk and very copious breakfast--especially as my uncle’s pew was exactly in front and in the vicinity of the pulpit! So, minded to do my best under the difficult circumstances, I stood up during the sermon. All in vain! Nature too peremptorily bade me sleep. I slept, with the result of executing an uninterrupted series of profound bows to the preacher, the suddenness and jerky nature of which evidently betokened the entirety of my agreement with his arguments. I feared the reproaches, which I doubted not awaited me on my way home. But my uncle contented himself with saying, “When you go to sleep during a sermon, Tom, never stand up to do it!” To sum up the story of my certainly unsuccessful, but not entirely profitless life at Oxford, I may say that I was not altogether an idle man, nor ever in any degree a sharer in any of the “faster” phases of academical life. I was always a reader. But what academical good could come to a man who was reading _The Diversions of Purley_, or Plot’s _Oxfordshire_, or Burton’s _Anatomy of Melancholy_, or Brown’s _Vulgar Errors_, when he ought to have been reading Aristotle’s _Ethics_? Among other reminiscences of the sort, my diary accuses me, for instance, for having taken from the library of Magdalen Hall (and read!) a volume called _Gaffarel’s Curiosities_. I suppose no other living man has read it! The work contains among other “curiosities,” a chapter “of incredible nonsense,” as my diary calls it, on the construction and proper use of Talismans!