For the present I see myself alone in the back drawing-room of No. 16, Keppel Street, in which room the family breakfast took place--probably to avoid the necessity of lighting another fire in the dining-room below--at 7 A.M., on my knees before the sofa, with my head in my hands and my eyes fixed on the _Eton Latin Grammar_ laid on the sofa cushion before me. My parents had not yet come down to breakfast, nor had the tea urn been brought up by the footman. _Nota bene._--My father was a poor man, and his establishment altogether on a modest footing. But it never would have occurred to him or to my mother that they could get on without a man-servant in livery. And though this liveried footman served a family in which two tallow candles with their snuffer dish supplied the whole illumination of the evening, had the livery been an _invented_ one instead of that proper to the family, the circumstance would have been an absurdity exciting the ridicule of all the society in which my parents lived. _Tempora mutantur!_ Certainly at the present day an equally unpretending household would be burthened by no footman. But on the morning which memory is recalling to me the footman was coming up with the urn, and my parents were coming down to breakfast, probably simultaneously; and the question of the hour was whether I could get the due relationship of relative and antecedent into my little head before the two events arrived. And that, as I remember it, was the almost unvaried routine for more than a year or two. I think, however, that the walks of which I was speaking when this retrospect presented itself to me must have belonged to a time a little, but not much later; for I had then advanced to the making of Latin verses. We used to begin in those days by making “nonsense verses.” And many of us ended in the same way! The next step--_Gradus ad Parnassum_--consisted in turning into Latin verse certain English materials provided for the purpose, and so cunningly prepared as to fall easily and almost inevitably into the required form. And these were the studies which, as I specially remember, were the subject of rehearsal during those walks from Lincoln’s Inn to Keppel Street. My father was in the habit of returning from his chambers to a five o’clock dinner--rather a late hour, because he was an industrious and laborious man. Well! we, that is my next brother (not the one whose name became subsequently well known in the world, but my brother Henry, who died early) and myself, used to walk from Keppel Street to Lincoln’s Inn, so as to arrive in time to walk back with my father. He was a fast walker; and as we trotted along one on each side of him, the repetition of our morning’s poetical achievements did not tend, as I well remember, to facilitate the difficulty of “keeping our wind.”