Fifty-eight railway companies now
belong to the House, and the amount of money dealt with by way of
division and apportionment in the year before the war was 31,071,910
pounds. In 1842 it was 193,246 pounds.
CHAPTER IV.
FASHIONS AND MANNERS, VICTORIAN DAYS
The boy who is strong and healthy, overflowing with animal spirits,
enjoys life in a way that is denied to his slighter-framed, more delicate
brother. Exercise imparts to him a physical exuberance to which the
other is a stranger. But Nature is kind. If she withholds her gifts in
one direction she bestows them in another. She grants the enjoyment of
sedentary pursuits to those to whom she has denied hardier pleasures.
During my schooldays I spent many happy hours alone with book or pen or
pencil. My father was fond of reading, and for a man of his limited
means, possessed a good collection of books; a considerable number of the
volumes of _Bohn's Standard Library_ as well as _Boswell's Life of
Johnson, Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, Butler's Hudibras, Bailey's
Festus, Gil Blas, Don Quixote, Pilgrim's Progress, the Arabian Nights,
Shakespeare_, most of the poets from _Chaucer_ down; and of novels,
_Bulwer Lytton's, Scott's, Dickens_' and _Thackeray's_.
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