f whom I have spoken earlier.
I think they were more refined and better bred than any of my
schoolfellows, at all events it was among these homely companions
alone that I continued to form congenial and sympathetic
relations. In one of these boys,--one of whom I have heard or
seen nothing now for nearly a generation,--I found tastes
singularly parallel to my own, and we scoured the horizon in
search of books in prose and verse, but particularly in verse.

As I grew stronger in muscle, I was capable of adding
considerably to my income by an exercise of my legs. I was
allowed money for the railway ticket between the town where the
school lay and the station nearest to my home. But, if I chose to
walk six or seven miles along the coast, thus more than halving
the distance by rail from school house to home, I might spend as
pocket money the railway fare I thus saved. Such considerable
sums I fostered in order to buy with them editions of the poets.
These were not in those days, as they are now, at the beck and
call of every purse, and the attainment of each little
masterpiece was a separate triumph. In particular I shall never
forget the excitement of reaching at length the exorbitant price
the bookseller asked for the only, although imperfect, edition of
the poems of S. T. Coleridge. At last I could meet his demand,
and my friend and I went down to consummate the solemn purchase.
Coming away with our treasure, we read aloud from the orange
coloured volume, in turns, as we strolled along, until at last we
sat down on the bulging root of an elm tree in a secluded lane.
Here we stayed, in a sort of poetical nirvana, reading, reading,
forgetting the passage of time, until the hour of our neglected
mid-day meal was a long while past, and we had to hurry home to
bread and cheese and a scolding.

There was occasionally some trouble about my reading, but now not
much nor often. I was rather adroit, and careful not to bring
prominently into sight anything of a literary kind which could
become a stone of stumbling. But, when I was nearly sixteen, I
made a purchase which brought me into sad trouble, and was the
cause of a permanent wound to my self-respect. I had long coveted
in the bookshop window a volume in which the poetical works of
Ben Jonson and Christopher Marlowe were said to be combined. This
I bought at length, and I carried it with me to devour as I trod
the desolate road that brought me along the edge of the cliff on