Ill] HERTFORD : HOME OF MY BOYHOOD 33 



together. Besides this, for the greater part of the time we 

 were schoolfellows at the Hertford Grammar School ; and it is 

 certainly a curious coincidence that this the earliest acquaint- 

 ance 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 stand- 

 ing 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 



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