In fact my life at Birmingham was for the most part a very solitary one. I used to come home tired and worn out to my lodgings with Mrs. Clements in New Hall Street; and the prospect of a lonely evening with my book, my teapot, and my pipe, was not unwelcome to me, for it was, at least, repose and quiet after noise and turmoil. Every now and then I used to dine and pass the evening with Dr. Jeune; and these were my red-letter days. Jeune had married the daughter of Dr. Symonds, the Warden of Wadham. She was a tall and very handsome woman, as well as an extremely agreeable one. At first, I remember, I used to think that if she had been the daughter of anybody else than the “Head of a House,” one just emerging from _statu pupillari_ might have found her more charming. But this soon wore off as we got to know each other better. And long talks with Mrs. Jeune are the pleasantest--indeed, I think I may say the only pleasant--recollections of my life at Birmingham. CHAPTER XVIII. I held my mastership in King Edward’s School at Birmingham a year and a half--from shortly after the first day of 1837 to the 19th of June, 1838. At the end of that time I went back to my mother’s house at Hadley. She had in the meantime returned from Vienna, had completed her two volumes on that journey, and published them with such a measure of success as to encourage her in hoping that she might vary her never-ceasing labour in the production of novels by again undertaking other journeys. But for this, and still more for the execution of other schemes, of which I shall have to speak further on, my presence and companionship were necessary to her. And after much consultation and very many walks together round the little quiet garden at Hadley, it was decided between us that I should send in my resignation of the Birmingham mastership, defer all alternative steps in the direction of any other life career, and devote myself, for the present at least, to becoming her companion and squire. The decision was a very momentous one. As might have been anticipated, the “deferring” of any steps in the direction of a professional career of any sort turned out eventually to be the final abandonment of any such. It could hardly be otherwise in the case of a young man of twenty-eight, which was my age at the time. I was the son of a father who had left absolutely nothing behind him, and I had no prospect whatever of any independent means from any other source. It is true that property settled on my mother before her marriage would in any case suffice to keep me from absolute destitution, but that was about all that could be said of it. And certainly the decision to which my mother and I came during these walks round and round the Hadley garden was audacious rather than prudent.