HERTFORD: HOME OF MY BOYHOOD 33 



is certainly a curious coincidence that this the earliest ac- 

 quaintance of my childhood, my playmate and schoolfellow, 

 should be the only one of all my schoolfellows who were also 

 friends, that I have ever seen again or that, so far as I know, 

 are now alive. 



The old town of Hertford, in which I passed the most 

 impressionable years of my life, and where I first obtained a 

 rudimentary acquaintance with my fellow-creatures and with 

 nature, is, perhaps, on the whole, one of the most pleasantly 

 situated county towns in England, although as a boy I did not 

 know this, and did not appreciate the many advantages I 

 enjoyed. Among its most delightful features are numerous 

 rivers and streams in the immediately surrounding country, 

 affording pleasant walks through flowery meads, many pic- 

 turesque old mills, and a great variety of landscape. The 

 river Lea, coming from the south-west, passes through the 

 middle of the town, where the old town mill was situated in 

 an open space called the Wash, which was no doubt liable to 

 be flooded in early times. The miller was reputed to be one 

 of the richest men in the town, yet we often saw him standing 

 at the mill doors in his dusty miller's clothes as we passed on 

 our way from school. He was a cousin of my mother's by 

 marriage, and we children sometimes went to tea at his house, 

 and then, as a great treat, were shown all over the mill with 

 all its strange wheels and whirling millstones, its queer little 

 pockets, on moving leather belts, carrying the wheat up to the 

 stones in a continual stream, the ever-rattling sieves and 

 cloths which sifted out the bran and pollard, and the weird 

 peep into the dark cavern where the great dripping water- 

 wheel went on its perpetual round. Where the river passed 

 under the bridge close by, we could clamber up and look over 

 the parapet into the deep, clear water rushing over a dam, 

 and also see where the stream that turned the wheel passed 

 swiftly under a low arch, and this was a sight that never 

 palled upon us, so that almost every fine day, as we passed 

 this way home from school, we gave a few moments to gazing 

 into this dark, deep water, almost always in shadow owing 



