At the latter place, too, there is a large and extremely prettily situated hotel, where, on the occasion of my first visit, I remember that we obtained a modicum of bread and cheese at a lone cottage. Even the Valley of Rocks is not altogether what it was, for the celebrated “Castle Rock” has now well contrived paths to the top of it. I wrote a few months ago in the book kept at the hotel, _ad hoc_ that I had climbed the Castle Rock more than sixty years ago, and had now repeated the feat. But in truth, the “climb” was in those days a different affair. I remember my mother had a story of some old friend of hers having been accompanied by her maid during a ramble through the Valley of Rocks, and having been told, when she asked the maid what she thought of it, that she considered it was kept very untidy! And truly the criticism might be repeated at the present day not altogether unreasonably, for the whole place is defiled by the traces of feeding. Truly England, whether for better or worse, “_non è più come era prima!_” That was my first journey! Has any one of the very many others which I have undertaken since equalled it in enjoyment? Ah! how sad was the return to Harrow and lessons and pupil-room! And how I wished that the old gig, with me on the little box between my parents’ knees, could have been bound on an expedition round the world! A leading feature, perhaps I should say _the_ leading feature, of the social life of Harrow in those days consisted in a certain antagonism between the vicar, the Rev. Mr. Cunningham, and the clerical element of the school world, or perhaps it would be more correct to say, the Drury element. Mr. Cunningham was in those days rather a man of mark among the Low Church party. He was an ally of the Venns, of Daniel Wilson, and that school, and was well known in his day as “Velvet-Cushion Cunningham,” from a little book with that title which he had published. He was of course an “evangelical” of the evangelicals; and among the seven masters of the school there was not the slightest--I must not say taint, but--savour of anything of the kind. Dr. Butler probably would have found no difficulty in living in perfect harmony with the vicar; but the latter--he and his ways and his doctrines--were especially abhorrent to the Drurys. Of course they were not High Churchmen in the sense which the term has acquired in these latter days, for nothing of the kind was then known. They were of the old-fashioned sort, which had come to be somewhat depreciatingly spoken of as “high and dry”!--though in truth it is difficult to see with what justice the latter epithet could be applied to many of them.