Page:Early Reminiscences.djvu/123



T the close of the summer of 1844, in August, we had returned to England. My father took lodgings at the head of Albemarle St., and I was sent to school at King's College.

A more depressing set of buildings could hardly have been contrived. The College and School form the east wing of Somerset House, and were built by Smirke in 1828, fossilized ugliness. We had to descend stone stairs and pass through an iron gate into the basement to our schoolrooms, opening out of a passage in which the gas was always burning. The windows, however, did look out into the hard paved playground, surrounded by high stone walls, in which not a blade of grass showed, and not a tree leaf quivered in the air. The place exercised a depressing effect upon the spirits, and the boys in the playground appeared destitute of buoyancy of life, crushed by the subterranean nature of the school and the appalling ugliness of the buildings.

Next year my father and mother departed for Warwick, and I was put as boarder with a Mr. Hayes, one of the masters at King's College School, in a large house at the corner of Queen's Square.

We had for supper bread and scrape, and sky-blue—i.e. diluted milk. On one occasion the boys discussed whether there existed butter enough on the slabs of bread to make them adhere anywhere. "I will try," said I, and flung my piece against the ceiling, and, lo! it stuck! The footman was obliged to get a broom to bring it down. Mr. Hayes was informed of what I had done, and sent for me to receive a reprimand. "Please, sir," said I, "I proved to the boys that we are not skimped in butter. They will all write home on Sunday and praise the way in which the butter is laid on." "Well," said Mr. Hayes good-humouredly,