It was during my last year at Winchester that I made my first attempt at authorship. Old Robbins, the grey-headed bookseller of College Street, who had been the college bookseller for many years, had recently taken a younger partner of the name of Wheeler, and this gentleman established a monthly magazine, called the _Hampshire and West of England Magazine_, to which I contributed three or four articles on matters Wiccamical. I have the volume before me now--perhaps the only extant copy of that long since forgotten publication. The Rev. E. Poulter, one of the prebendaries of Winchester, who had a somewhat wider than local reputation as a wit in those days, was the anonymous contributor of a poetical prologue of such unconscionable proportions that poor Wheeler was sadly puzzled what to do with it. It was impossible to refuse or neglect a reverend prebendary’s contribution, besides that the verses, often doggerel, had some good fun in them. So they were all printed by instalments in successive numbers, despite the title of prologue which their author gives them. CHAPTER VII. I came back from Winchester for the last time after the election of 1828, to find a great change at home. My father, pressed more and more by pecuniary difficulties, had quitted Harrow, and established himself at Harrow Weald, a hamlet of the large parish in the direction of Pinner. He had not given up his farm at Harrow. He would have been only too glad to do so, for it involved an annual loss undeviatingly; but that he could not do, for his lease tied him to the stake. But he took another farm at Harrow Weald, on which there was an old farm-house, which had once been a very good one, and, living there, carried on both farms. How far this speculation was a wise one I have no means of judging. Doubtless he took the Harrow Weald farm upon very largely more advantageous terms than those which he had accepted from Lord Northwick for the farm at Harrow; but having been absent all the time at Winchester, I knew so little about the matter that I do not now know even who his Harrow Weald landlord was. Possibly I did know but have forgotten. But I think I remember to have heard my father say that the Harrow Weald farm did in some decree alleviate the loss sustained by the larger farm at Harrow, and that, could he have got rid of the latter, the Harrow Weald farm might have paid its way. The excellent house he had built at Harrow was in the meantime let to Mr. Cunningham, the vicar. The change from it to the old farm-house at Harrow Weald, as a home, was not a pleasant one; but a very far worse and more important change awaited my home coming, in the absence of my mother. She had gone to America.