8 AUTOBIOGRAPHY 



mere boy — I think between thirteen and fourteen years of 

 age — when I was taken by some older student friends of 

 mine to the first post-mortem examination I ever attended. 

 All my life I have been most unfortunately sensitive to the 

 disagreeables which attend anatomical pursuits, but on this 

 occasion my curiosity overpowered all other feelings, and I 

 spent two or three hours in gratifying it. I did not cut my- 

 self, and none of the ordinary symptoms of dissection-poison 

 supervened, but poisoned I was somehow, and I remember 

 sinking into a strange state of apathy. By way of a last 

 chance, I was sent to the care of some good, kind people, 

 friends of my father's, who lived in a farmhouse in the 

 heart of Warwickshire. I remember staggering from my 

 bed to the window on the bright spring morning after my 

 arrival, and throwing open the casement. Life seemed 

 to come back on the wings of the breeze, and to this day 

 the faint odour of wood-smoke, like that which floated 

 across the farm-yard in the early morning, is as good to 

 me as the "sweet south upon a bed of violets." I soon 

 recovered, but for years I suffered from occasional par- 

 oxysms of internal pain, and from that time my constant 

 friend, hypochondriacal dyspepsia, commenced his half 

 century of co-tenancy of my fleshly tabernacle. 



Looking back on my "Lehrjahre," I am sorry to say 

 that I do not think that any account of my doings as a 

 student would tend to edification. In fact, I should dis- 

 tinctly warn ingenuous youth to avoid imitating my example. 

 I worked extremely hard when it pleased me, and when it 

 did not — which was a very frequent case — I was extremely 

 idle (unless making caricatures of one's pastors and masters 

 is to be called a branch of industry), or else wasted my 

 energies in wTong directions. I read everything I could 

 lay hands upon, including novels, and took up all sorts of 



