Once, when I was lying on the floor, my mother said to my brother John, without anything previously being spoken on the subject, and suddenly, in a kind of unconscious speech, 'John, let Isaac go to college and study.' These words went through me like liquid fire.

He made some evasive answer and there it ended.

Although to study has always been the secret desire of my heart from my youth, I never felt inclined to open my mind to any one on the subject.

And now I find, after a long time, that I have been led here as strangely as possible." His childhood seems to have been a serious one.

In recurring to it in later life, as he often did, he never spoke of any games or sports in which he had shared, nor, in fact, of any amusements before the time when he began to attend lectures and the theatre.