I have spoken of the immense change operated in the circumstances and surroundings of all of us by my mother’s return from America and the success of her first work, the _Domestic Manners of the Americans_. But, efficacious as this success was for producing so great a change, and sufficient as the continued success of her subsequent works was to rescue the whole of her family from the slough of ruin, in which my father’s farming operations, and to some extent, I suppose his injudicious commercial attempt at Cincinnati, had involved him, the results of this success were very far from availing to stem the tide of ruin as regarded his affairs. They were sufficient to relieve him from all expenses connected with the household or its individual members, but not to supply in addition to all these, the annual losses on the Harrow farm. Hence the break-up described by my brother Anthony in his _Autobiography_, and my father’s exodus from Harrow as there narrated. CHAPTER XII. Of all that Anthony there describes I saw nothing. I was attending the “divinity lectures” in Oxford. But as soon as the short course of them was completed, I left England to join my parents at Bruges. And here is the condensed record of the journey as performed in 1834. I suppose that I went by the Thames to Calais, instead of by Dover, as a measure of economy. I left Oxford by the “Rocket” at three in the morning on Tuesday, the 20th May, and on reaching London found that there was no packet to Ostend till the following Saturday. I determined, therefore, to go to Calais by that which left Tower Stairs on the Wednesday. It was the first time I had ever crossed the Channel. The times I have crossed that salt girdle subsequently must be counted by hundreds! I observe that having begun my journey at 3 A.M. did not prevent me from finding “Farren admirable” in both _The Minister and the Mercer_ and in _Secret Service_, at Drury Lane that Tuesday evening. I slept at the Spread Eagle in Gracechurch Street that night, and left Tower Stairs at 10 A.M. the next morning in the _Lord Melville_, Captain Middleton (names of ship and captain duly recorded), and had a rough passage of thirteen hours; all hands sick, “even I a little at last,” says the veracious chronicle. I was taken by the victor in a sharp contest with half a dozen rivals over my body, to the Hôtel de Londres, a clean, comfortable, and quiet, but, I suppose, quite second-rate inn. There was no conveyance to Dunkirk before one the next day. So, “after a delicious breakfast on coffee.” (Ah! how _la belle France_ has _dégringoléd_ in respect to coffee and some other matters since those happy days! Then coffee really was _always_ good everywhere in France. Now England has no cause whatever to envy her neighbour in that respect.) I spent the intervening hours in going (of all things in the world) to the top of the church tower. The diligence brought me to Dunkirk in time for supper