Page:Popular tales from the Norse (1912).djvu/25

 Rh He witnessed, as a Westminster boy, the coronation of William the Fourth. The ceremony in the Abbey, and the burning of the old Houses of Parliament a few years later were, he used to say, the things which most impressed themselves upon his boyish memory at the time. Nor was it likely that the agitation prevailing in the country at the time of the great Reform Movement would find much reflection within the walls of St. Peter's College on the Isle of Thorns, although Westminster was then the favoured school of the great Whig families of England.

In 1832 Dasent's father died, and the final emancipation of the slaves a little later proving the death-knell of the commercial prosperity of the West Indian islands, it became increasingly difficult for the proprietors to live upon their estates. The care of the younger children devolved in great measure upon their half-brother John Bury Dasent [late Judge of County Courts, who died, aged eighty-one, in 1888], then a young student of the Middle Temple, residing on very slender means in Serjeants' Inn, Fleet Street.

It so happened that John Sterling, the amiable son of the "Thunderer of the Times" had visited St. Vincent in 1831, shortly before old Mr. Dasent's death, to assume the management of a sugar estate at a place called Colonarie. His health had been very indifferent, and it was hoped that a voyage to the tropics in a sailing-ship would restore it. An intimacy, not without influence on the future career of young George Dasent, as will be seen hereafter, soon sprang up between the two families.

After leaving Westminster, Dasent went for a time to