When at the end of the summer holidays in that year, 1820, I returned to college, again brought down to Winchester by my father in his gig, I confess to having felt for some short time a very desolate little waif. As I, at the time a child barely out of the nursery, look back upon it, it seems to my recollection that the strongest sense of being shoved off from shore without guidance, help, or protection, arose from never seeing or speaking to a female human being. To be sure there was at the sick-house the presiding “mother”--Gumbrell her name was, usually pronounced “Grumble”--but she was not a fascinating representative of the sex. An aged woman once nearly six feet high, then much bent by rheumatism, rather grim and somewhat stern, she very conscientiously administered the prescribed “black-dose and calomel pill” to those under her care at the sick-house. To be there was called being “continent;” to leave it was “going abroad”--intelligibly enough. Tea was provided there for those “continent” instead of the usual breakfast of bread and butter and beer; and I remember overhearing Mother Gumbrell, oppressed by an unusual number of inmates, say, “Talk of Job indeed! Job never had to cut crusty loaves into bread and butter!” I saw the old woman die! I was by chance in the sick-house kitchen--in after years, when a prefect--and “Dicky Gumbrell,” the old woman’s husband, who had been butler to Dean Ogle, and who by special and exceptional favour was allowed to live with his wife in the sick-house, was reading to her the story of Joseph and his Brethren, while she was knitting a stocking, and sipping occasionally from a jug of college beer which stood between them, when quite suddenly her hands fell on to her lap and her head on to her bosom, and she was dead! while poor old Dicky quite unconsciously went on with his reading. But I mentioned Mother Gumbrell only to observe that she, the only petticoated creature whom we ever saw or spoke with, was scarcely calculated to supply, even to the imagination, the feminine element which had till then made so large a part of the lives of ten-year-old children fresh from their mother’s knee.