rice. . . . When I think of it, the picture always rises in my mind, of a
summer evening, the boys at play in the churchyard, and I sitting on my
bed, reading as if for life. Every barn in the neighborhood, every stone
in the church, and every foot of the churchyard, had some association of
its own, in my mind, connected with these books, and stood for some
locality made famous in them. I have seen Tom Pipes go climbing up the
church-steeple; I have watched Strap, with the knapsack on his back,
stopping to rest himself upon the wicket-gate; and I _know_ that
Commodore Trunnion held that club with Mr. Pickle, in the parlor of our
little village ale-house." Every word of this personal recollection had
been written down as fact, some years before it found its way into
_David Copperfield_; the only change in the fiction being his omission
of the name of a cheap series of novelists then in course of
publication, by which his father had become happily the owner of so
large a lump of literary treasure in his small collection of books.

The usual result followed. The child took to writing, himself, and
became famous in his childish circle for having written a tragedy called
_Misnar_, the Sultan of India, founded (and very literally founded, no
doubt) on one of the _Tales of the Genii_. Nor was this his only
distinction. He told a story offhand so well, and sang small comic songs
so especially well, that he used to be elevated on chairs and tables,
both at home and abroad, for more effective display of these talents;
and when he first told me of this, at one of the Twelfth-night parties
on his eldest son's birthday, he said he never recalled it that his own
shrill little voice of childhood did not again tingle in his ears, and
he blushed to think what a horrible little nuisance he must have been to
many unoffending grown-up people who were called upon to admire him.

His chief ally and encourager in these displays was a youth of some
ability, much older than himself, named James Lamert, stepson to his
mother's sister, and therefore a sort of cousin, who was his great
patron and friend in his childish days. Mary, the eldest daughter of
Charles Barrow, himself a lieutenant in the navy, had for her first
husband a commander in the navy called Allen; on whose death by drowning
at Rio Janeiro she had joined her sister, the navy-pay clerk's wife, at
Chatham; in which place she subsequently took for her second husband Dr.
Lamert, an ar