At another page I stumble on the record of a conversation with the sexton of Leatherhead, whom, in one of my rambles, I found digging a grave in the churchyard there. Three shillings, I learned, was the price of a grave of the ordinary depth of five feet. Those, however, who could afford the luxury of lying deeper paid a shilling a foot more. One more note from the diaries of those days I will venture to give, because it may be taken as a paraleipomenon to that _Autobiography_ of my brother, which the world was kindly pleased to take some interest in:-- “Went to town yesterday [from Harrow], and among other commissions bought a couple of single-sticks with strong basket handles. Anthony much approves of them, and this morning we had a bout with them. One of the sticks bought yesterday soon broke, and we supplied its place by a tremendous blackthorn. Neither of us left the arena without a fair share of rather severe wales; but Anthony is far my superior in quickness and adroitness, and perhaps in bearing pain too. I fear he is likely to remain so in the first two, but in the third I am determined he shall not.” Thus says the yellow fifty-seven-year-old page! And I have literally thousands of such pages; voluminous records--among other matters--of walking excursions in the home counties, in Devon, in Wales, in Gloucestershire, and the banks of the Severn and Wye, not a page of which fails to bear its testimony to the curiously changed circumstances under which a pedestrian would now undertake such wanderings. I find among other jottings--deemed _memorabilia_ at the time--that I carried a knapsack weighing twenty-eight pounds over the top of Plinlimmon, because I considered seven and sixpence demanded by the guide for accompanying me, excessive. But _ohe! jam satis_. I will inflict no more upon the patient reader--the impatient will have skipped much of what I have already given him. Alas! the _amari aliquid_ of these old records is the unblushing chronicle of _intentions_, enough to have paved all Acheron with a durability unachieved by any highway board! The only comfort for diarists so imprudently candid as to record such aspirations, and so yet more imprudent as to read them half a century after the penning of them, is the consideration that _au bout des comptes_ the question is, not what one has done, but what one has become. If one could flatter oneself that one has the _mens sana in corpore sano_ at seventy-seven years, one might accept and condone the past without too much regret; and at all events it is something to have undeniably brought the latter to its seventy-eighth year. CHAPTER XI.