96 PRÆTERITA-I

marvel of Menai Straits and Bridge, which I looked at, then, as Miss Edgeworth had taught me, with reverence for the mechanical skill of man,-little thinking, poor innocent, what use I should see the creature putting his skill to, in the half century to come.

The Menai Bridge it was, remember, good reader, not tube;¹-but the trim plank roadway swinging smooth between its iron cobwebs from tower to tower.

109. And so on to Llanberis and up Snowdon, of which ascent I remember, as the most exciting event, the finding for the first time in my life a real “mineral” for myself, a piece of copper pyrites! But the general impression of Welsh mountain form was so true and clear that subsequent journeys little changed or deepened it.

And if only then my father and mother had seen the real strengths and weaknesses of their little John;-if they had given me but a shaggy scrap of a Welsh pony, and left me in charge of a good Welsh guide, and of his wife, if I needed any coddling, they would have made a man of me there and then, and afterwards the comfort of their own hearts, and probably the first geologist of my time in Europe.

If only! But they could no more have done it than thrown me like my cousin Charles into Croydon Canal,² trusting me to find my way out by the laws of nature.

110. Instead, they took me back to London, and my father spared time from his business hours, once or twice a week, to take me to a four-square, sky-lighted, sawdust-floored prison of a riding-school in Moorfields, the smell of which, as we turned in at the gate of it, was a terror and horror and abomination to me: and there I was put on big horses that jumped, and reared, and circled, and sidled; and fell off them regularly whenever they did any of those things; and was a disgrace to my family, and a burning shame and misery to myself, till at last the riding-school was given up on my spraining my right-hand fore-finger

¹ [For other references to the tubular bridge, see Vol. IX. p. 456, and Vol. XIX.p. 24.]

² [See above, § 99, p. 89.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]