98 THE EARLY DAYS OF 



turned his pockets inside out, the only paper he could find was his 

 holiday task, with hardly a single grammatical mistake, according 

 to his own account. Being on the horns of a dilemma, he rapidly 

 turned over in his mind what on earth he should do ; and coming 

 to the conclusion that his master would much prefer the hare to 

 the holiday task, he rammed the document down the barrel and 

 shot at the hare. 



I had no idea when I began writing this story down that it would 

 become so long, or I should have hesitated before producing it, and 

 the master must have been unusually good-natured to hear it out ; 

 but hear it out he did, and when it ended he curtly called out, 



" And where's the hare ? " 



" O, please sir, I'm awfully sorry, sir, but / missed it /" * 



As my ancestors, so far back as there is any record of them, 

 appear to have been sportsmen; no wonder that during the hour or 

 so which we were allowed, twice a week, to wander through the town 

 of Marlborough, I spent some portion of my time in flattening my 

 nose against a window where a certain old pistol was exposed for 

 sale. I longed to buy it at the advertised price — five shillings. At 

 last I screwed up courage and scrawled a letter to my mother, 

 saying that I wanted five shillings sadly ; and in due time that sum 

 arrived with the remark that I had set a-going much speculation as 

 to the reason why the money was so urgently required. My father 

 supposed it was to purchase the egg of some rare bird; whilst my 

 mother thought perhaps it was to buy a white feather from a 

 sparrow's wing. But it was really to buy that pistol. The shop- 

 keeper ought not to have sold it to me, but he did ; and forthwith 

 I and another boy employed our time in casting bullets; but disaster 

 soon commenced. First we poured some of the molten lead into 

 the hollow handle of a shovel containing water, and the steam 

 generated there, shot the lead with tremendous force up to the 

 ceiling, narrowly missing our faces, but it burnt our hands. Then 



* This incident, which must have occurred about the time of Waterloo, is perhaps still current at 

 Westminster. 



