Occasionally when a holiday from lessons occurred--I am afraid most probably in consequence of my father being confined to his bed with headaches, which even at that early day, and increasingly, as years went on, afflicted him--we, my brother Henry and I, obtained permission for a longer ramble. I have no recollection that on these occasions either the parks (unless perhaps sometimes St. James’s Park), or Kensington Gardens, or Hampstead, or Highgate, or any of the places that might be supposed to be attractive had any attractions for us. Our faces were ever turned eastward. The city with its narrow mysterious lanes, and still more mysterious wharves, its quaint secluded churches, its Guildhall, and its Gog and Magog, the queer localities of the halls of its Companies, and specially the abstruse mystery of that venerable Palladium, the London stone, excited in those days an irresistible influence on my imagination. But above all else the grand object of a much-planned eastern pilgrimage was the Docks!--with the out-going ships bearing, tied to their shrouds, boards indicating their destinations. Here again was unsatisfied longing! But it was a longing more tempered by awe and uncertainty. I am not sure that I would, if it had been offered to me, have stepped on board an East Indiaman bound for Bombay as eagerly as I would have climbed a coach starting for the Land’s End. But it was a great triumph to have seen with our own eyes the _Agra_ (or some other) _Castle_ majestically passing through the dock gates, while passengers on deck, men and women, whose feet would absolutely touch land no more till they stopped at far Bombay on the other side of the world, spoke last farewells to friends standing on the dock walls or even on the gates themselves.