Cook's "Travels," a fascinating middle-eighteenth century Atlas with abounding Terræ Incognitæ, are vivid among the writer's memories. On Sundays mother insisted upon the Bible, but Sturm's "Reflections" and Clarke's New Testament with its footnotes sowed the seeds of an early scepticism. Some Shakespeare he read at school, but not much of him otherwise; all of Dickens that was not at home he found at a cousin's home, and the pictures in a Wood's "Natural History" possessed by that same cousin gave him an inkling of evolution and a nightmare terror of gorillas.
When the writer was ten or eleven his father was disabled by a fall which crippled him, and when he was thirteen the little shop collapsed. His mother returned as housekeeper to her former mistress at Up Park, and his father took refuge in a small, inexpensive cottage. Further education for the writer seemed impossible. There was some trouble in finding him employment, an unhandy boy preoccupied with reading. He was tried over as a draper's apprentice, as a pupil-teacher in an elementary school, as a chemist's apprentice, and again as a draper. After two years with the second draper, a Mr. Hyde of Southsea, he prayed to have his indentures cancelled, and became a sort of pupil-teacher at the Midhurst Grammar-School. In the intervals between these attempts to begin life he took refuge in the housekeeper's room with his mother at Up Park. From the library above stairs he borrowed and read translations of Plutarch's "Lives," Plato's "Republic," and Lucretius, and, most entrancing book! "Vathek"; and he struggled
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