Having just been disappointed in my endeavours to procure a boat at Hester's, I was returning towards my dames about the middle of after-six, totally at a loss for amusement. Every other boy was now eagerly employed on the river, or at cricket, and the whole college was silent and deserted. As I strolled listlessly along, I observed a funeral slowly issuing from the church-door on its way to the burial-ground. Singular to say, this was the first instance of death's doing on a fellow-being I had yet witnessed. On its approach, I seated myself on the Long-walk wall, and watched the coffin and its noiseless followers, as they glided slowly before me. So soon as all had passed, I quietly slid down from my seat, and accompanied the procession at a little distance.
While we are young, we are not only moved more easily, but doubt not that every person else feels as sincerely. Under this impression, I accompanied the corpse towards its grave, touched with a sort of pity for the mourners, and sobered by a deep and respectful sympathy.
As I stood by the brink of the grave, I could not but feel a soothing comfort and hope under our affliction, so beautifully held out to us by the spirit of "the service of the dead;" and I even entertained an affection for the clergyman who officiated. But when I witnessed the lowering of the coffin to its future resting-place—heard the soft crumbling of the churchyard soil, as it dropped from the grasp of the sexton on the below-sounding coffin, down below—the anguished but stifled moan of the childless father, who had apparently expended his hard-got earnings for the interment of his child—I not only repassed the gates considerably affected, but overpowered with an indescribable dread of impending death. I was now possessed with a servile love of God, arising from fear; an anxiety to please and obey him, to an infinite degree. Alas! even at this early age, how worldly-minded, how pitiful, can be our motives!
I now determined within myself, as resolutely as presumptuously, to "go and sin no more;" and to that effect, that very evening, dived to the bottom of Deadman's Hole, and returned to Joe Hyde his horribly portentous bottles.
CHAPTER IV.[ToC]
A few weeks previous to the holidays, "the old Queen" gave a magnificent fête at Frogmore, when, to form a prominent feature in the day's amusements, her favourites, the Etonians, were invited to play a cricket-match, for which a beautiful space of lawn had already been most good-naturedly prepared.
I think the first approach to royalty must ever be most interesting to boys, at least it was deeply so to me on this day; for when I observed the wide-swelling lawns, the broad groves, and glassy lakes of this little paradise; the Queen, with the princesses and royal suite, as they glided over the turf in a train of pony-carriages, lined and shining with the richest satins; the splendid and gaudy clusters of marquees, glittering in all the pride of Tippoo's eastern magnificence, from whom they had been rifled, with their bright crescents blazing in the sunbeams—I found all the lovely and dearly remembered fancies, conjured before my infant imagination by the nursery tale, at once placed in delightful reality before me.