All the usual childish complaints and maladies touched me very lightly. I was as indifferent to weather, wet or dry, wind or shine, as a Shetland pony. Feet wet through had to remain _in statu quo_ till they were dry again. Assiduously taught by my mother, I read at a very early age. Her plan for teaching the letters was as follows. She had a great number of bone counters with the alphabet in capitals and small letters on either side printed on them; then having invited a charming little girl, the daughter of a neighbour--(Katie Gibbon, laid to rest this many a year under the yew tree in the churchyard of the village of Stanton, near Monmouth)--who was just my own age, she tossed the counters broadcast over the floor, instituting prizes for him, or her, who should in crawling races over the floor, soonest bring the letter demanded. Reading thus began to be an amusement to me at an unusually early age. I believe I gave early indications of possessing a certain quantum of brain power; but had no reputation for cleverness. Indeed, had my parents ever formed the opinion that any one of their children was in any way markedly clever, they would have carefully concealed it from the subject of it. I take it, I was far from being what is called a prepossessing child. I had, I well remember, a reputation for an uncompromising expression of opinion, which was not altogether admirable. My mother used to tell in after years how, when once I had been, at about four years old, attentively watching her dressing for dinner, while standing on a chair by the side of her dressing table, I broke silence when the work was completed to say very judicially, “Now you have made yourself as fine as poso--(possible)--and you look worse than you did when you began!” I am tempted to insert here a letter to my father from Dr. Williams, my old Winchester master, which (amusingly to me) illustrates what I have here written of my nursery tendencies. It belongs to a later date, when I was within half a year of leaving Winchester. I had not found it among my papers when I wrote the passage to which it is now appended. But I place it here in homage to the dictum that the child is father to the man. “I have the pleasure,” Dr. Williams writes, “to express my approbation of your son’s conduct during the last half-year. His firmness in maintaining what was right and putting down what was wrong was very conspicuous in the early part of that time; not that I imagine it was less afterwards, but occasion did not call it forth so much.” What the occasion was I entirely forget; evidently he refers to some exercise of my power as a Prefect. “I have remarked to you before that he is _fond of having a reason_ assigned for every thing; but he must take care that this do not degenerate into captiousness. His temper is generally good, but a little too sensitive when he fancies a smile is raised at his expense.”