I should do myself an injustice, however, if I described my attitude to faith at this time as wanting in candour. I did very earnestly desire to follow where my Father led. That passion for imitation, which I have already discussed, was strongly developed at this time, and it induced me to repeat the language of pious books in godly ejaculations which greatly edified my grown-up companions, and were, so far as I can judge, perfectly sincere. I wished extremely to be good and holy, and I had no doubt in my mind of the absolute infallibility of my Father as a guide in heavenly things. But I am perfectly sure that there never was a moment in which my heart truly responded, with native ardour, to the words which flowed so readily, in such a stream of unction, from my anointed lips. I cannot recall anything but an intellectual surrender; there was never joy in the act of resignation, never the mystic's rapture at feeling his phantom self, his own threadbare soul, suffused, thrilled through, robed again in glory by a fire which burns up everything personal and individual about him.

Through thick and thin I clung to a hard nut of individuality, deep down in my childish nature. To the pressure from without I resigned everything else, my thoughts, my words, my anticipations, my assurances, but there was something which I never resigned, my innate and persistent self. Meek as I seemed, and gently respondent, I was always conscious of that innermost quality which I had learned to recognize in my earlier days in Islington, that existence of two in the depths who could speak to one another in inviolable secrecy.

'This a natural man may discourse of, and that very knowingly, and give a kind of natural credit to it, as to a history that may be true; but firmly to believe that there is divine truth in all these things, and to have a persuasion of it stronger than of the very thing we see with our eyes; such an assent as this is the peculiar work of the Spirit of God, and is certainly saving faith.'

This passage is not to be found in the writings of any extravagant Plymouth Brother, but in one of the most solid classics of the Church, in Archbishop Leighton's Commentary on the First Epistle of Peter. I quote it because it defines, more exactly than words of my own could hope to do, the difference which already existed, and in secrecy began forthwith to be more and more acutely accentuated between my Father and myself. He did indeed possess this saving faith, which could move mountains of evidence, and suffer no diminution under the action of failure or disappointment. I, on the other hand—as I began to feel dimly then, and see luminously now—had only acquired the habit of giving what the Archbishop means by 'a kind of natural credit' to the doctrine so persistently impressed upon my conscience. From its very nature this could not but be molten in the dews and exhaled in the sunshine of life and thought and experience.

My Father, by an indulgent act for the caprice of which I cannot wholly account, presently let in a flood of imaginative light which was certainly hostile to my heavenly calling. My instinctive interest in geography has already been mentioned. This was the one branch of knowledge in which I needed no instruction, geographical information seeming to soak into the cells of my brain without an effort. At the age of eleven, I knew a great deal more of maps, and of the mutual relation of localities all over the globe, than most grown-up people do. It was almost a mechanical acquirement. I was now greatly taken with the geography of the West Indies, of every part of which I had made MS. maps. There was something powerfully attractive to my fancy in the great chain of the Antilles, lying on the sea like an open bracelet, with its big jewels and little jewels strung on an invisible thread. I liked to shut my eyes and see it all, in a mental panorama, stretched from Cape Sant' Antonio to the Serpent's Mouth. Several of these lovely islands, these emeralds and amethysts set on the Caribbean Sea, my Father had known well in his youth, and I was importunate in questioning him about them. One day, as I multiplied inquiries, he rose in his impetuous way, and climbing to the top of a bookcase, brought down a thick volume and presented it to me. 'You'll find all about the Antilles there,' he said, and left me with Tom Cringle's Log in my possession.

The embargo laid upon every species of fiction by my Mother's powerful scruple had never been raised, although she had been dead four years. As I have said in an earlier chapter, this was a point on which I believe that my Father had never entirely agreed with her. He had, however, yielded to her prejudice; and no work of romance, no fictitious story, had ever come in my way. It is remarkable that among our books, which amounted to many hundreds, I had never discovered a single work of fiction until my Father himself revealed the existence of Michael Scott's wild masterpiece. So little did I understand what was allowable in the way of literary invention that I began the story without a doubt that it was true, and I think it was my Father himself who, in answer to an inquiry, explained to me that it was 'all made up'. He advised me to read the descriptions of the sea, and of the mountains of Jamaica, and 'skip' the pages which gave imaginary adventures and conversations. But I did not take his counsel; these latter were the flower of the book to me. I had never read, never dreamed of anything like them, and they filled my whole horizon with glory and with joy.

I suppose that when my Father was a younger man, and less pietistic, he had read Tom Cringle's Log with pleasure, because it recalled familiar scenes to him. Much was explained by the fact that the frontispiece of this edition was a delicate line- engraving of Blewfields, the great lonely house in a garden of Jamaican all-spice where for eighteen months he had worked as a naturalist. He could not look at this print without recalling exquisite memories and airs that blew from a terrestrial paradise. But Michael Scott's noisy amorous novel of adventure was an extraordinary book to put in the hands of a child who had never been allowed to glance at the mildest and most febrifugal story-book.

It was like giving a glass of brandy neat to someone who had never been weaned from a milk diet. I have not read Tom Cringle's Log from that day to this, and I think that I should be unwilling now to break the charm of memory, which may be largely illusion. But I remember a great deal of the plot and not a little of the language, and, while I am sure it is enchantingly spirited, I am quite as sure that the persons it describes were far from being unspotted by the world. The scenes at night in the streets of Spanish Town surpassed not merely my experience, but, thank goodness, my imagination. The nautical personages used, in their conversations, what is called 'a class of language', and there ran, if I am not mistaken, a glow and gust of life through the romance from beginning to end which was nothing if it was not resolutely pagan.

There were certain scenes and images in Tom Cringle's Log which made not merely a lasting impression upon my mind, but tinged my outlook upon life. The long adventures, fightings and escapes, sudden storms without, and mutinies within, drawn forth as they were, surely with great skill, upon the fiery blue of the boundless tropical ocean, produced on my inner mind a sort of glimmering hope, very vaguely felt at first, slowly developing, long stationary and faint, but always tending towards a belief that I should escape at last from the narrowness of the life we led at home, from this bondage to the Law and the Prophets.

I must not define too clearly, nor endeavour too formally to insist on the blind movements of a childish mind. But of this I am quite sure, that the reading and re-reading of Tom Cringle's Log did more than anything else, in this critical eleventh year of my life, to give fortitude to my individuality, which was in great danger—as I now see—of succumbing to the pressure my Father brought to bear upon it from all sides. My soul was shut up, like Fatima, in a tower to which no external influences could come, and it might really have been starved to death, or have lost the power of recovery and rebound, if my captor, by some freak not yet perfectly accounted for, had not gratuitously opened a little window in it and added a powerful telescope. The daring chapters of Michael Scott's picaresque romance of the tropics were that telescope and that window.

In the spring of this year, I began to walk about the village and even proceed for considerable distances into the country by myself, and after reading Tom Cringle's Log those expeditions were accompanied by a constant hope of meeting with some adventures. I did not court events, however, except in fancy, for I was very shy of real people, and would break off some gallant dream of prowess on the high seas to bolt into a field and hide behind the hedge, while a couple of labouring men went by. Sometimes, however, the wave of a great purpose would bear me on, as when once, but certainly at an earlier date than I have now reached, hearing the dangers of a persistent drought much dwelt upon, I carried my small red watering pot, full of water, up to the top of the village, and then all the way down Petittor Lane, and discharged its contents in a cornfield, hoping by this act to improve the prospects of the harvest. A more eventful excursion must be described, because of the moral impression it left indelibly upon me.

I have described the sequestered and beautiful hamlet of Barton, to which I was so often taken visiting by Mary Grace Burmington. At Barton there lived a couple who were objects of peculiar interest to me, because of the rather odd fact that having come, out of pure curiosity, to see me baptized, they had been then and there deeply convinced of their spiritual danger. These were John Brooks, an Irish quarryman, and his wife, Ann Brooks. These people had not merely been hitherto unconverted, but they had openly treated the Brethren with anger and contempt. They came, indeed, to my baptism to mock, but they went away impressed.

Next morning, when Mrs. Brooks was at the wash tub, as she told us, Hell opened at her feet, and the Devil came out holding a long scroll on which the list of her sins was written. She was so much excited, that the motion brought about a miscarriage and she was seriously ill. Meanwhile, her husband, who had been equally moved at the baptism, was also converted, and as soon as she was well enough, they were baptized together, and then 'broke bread' with us. The case of the Brookses was much talked about, and was attributed, in a distant sense, to me; that is to say, if I had not been an object of public curiosity, the Brookses might have remained in the bond of iniquity. I, therefore, took a very particular interest in them, and as I presently heard that they were extremely poor, I was filled with a fervent longing to minister to their necessities.

Somebody had lately given me a present of money, and I begged little sums here and there until I reached the very considerable figure of seven shillings and sixpence. With these coins safe in a little linen bag, I started one Sunday afternoon, without saying anything to anyone, and I arrived at the Brookses' cottage in Barton. John Brooks was a heavy dirty man, with a pock-marked face and two left legs; his broad and red face carried small side-whiskers in the manner of that day, but was otherwise shaved. When I reached the cottage, husband and wife were at home, doing nothing at all in the approved Sunday style. I was received by them with some surprise, but I quickly explained my mission, and produced my linen bag. To my disgust, all John Brooks said was, 'I know'd the Lord would provide,' and after emptying my little bag into the palm of an enormous hand, he swept the contents into his trousers pocket, and slapped his leg. He said not one single word of thanks or appreciation, and I was absolutely cut to the heart.

I think that in the course of a long life I have never experienced a bitterer disappointment. The woman, who was quicker, and more sensitive, doubtless saw my embarrassment, but the form of comfort which she chose was even more wounding to my pride. 'Never mind, little master,' she said, 'you shall come and see me feed the pigs.' But there is a limit to endurance, and with a sense of having been cruelly torn by the tooth of ingratitude, I fled from the threshold of the Brookses, never to return.

At tea that afternoon, I was very much downcast, and under cross- examination from Miss Marks, all my little story came out. My Father, who had been floating away in a meditation, as he very often did, caught a word that interested him and descended to consciousness. I had to tell my tale over again, this time very sadly, and with a fear that I should be reprimanded. But on the contrary, both my Father and Miss Marks were attentive and most sympathetic, and I was much comforted. 'We must remember they are the Lord's children,' said my Father. 'Even the Lord can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear,' said Miss Marks, who was considerably ruffled. 'Alas! alas!' replied my Father, waving his hand with a deprecating gesture. 'The dear child!' said Miss Marks, bristling with indignation, and patting my hand across the tea-table. 'The Lord will reward your zealous loving care of his poor, even if they have neither the grace nor the knowledge to thank you,' said my Father, and rested his brown eyes meltingly upon me. 'Brutes!' said Miss Marks, thinking of John and Ann Brooks. 'Oh no! no!' replied my Father, 'but hewers of wood and drawers of water! We must bear with the limited intelligence.' All this was an emollient to my wounds, and I became consoled. But the springs of benevolence were dried up within me, and to this day I have never entirely recovered from the shock of John Brooks's coarse leer and his 'I know'd the Lord would provide.' The infant plant of philanthropy was burned in my bosom as if by quick-lime.

In the course of the summer, a young schoolmaster called on my Father to announce to him that he had just opened a day-school for the sons of gentlemen in our vicinity, and he begged for the favour of a visit. My Father returned his call; he lived in one of the small white villas, buried in laurels, which gave a discreet animation to our neighbourhood. Mr. M. was frank and modest, deferential to my Father's opinions and yet capable of defending his own. His school and he produced an excellent impression, and in August I began to be one of his pupils. The school was very informal; it was held in the two principal dwelling-rooms on the ground-floor of the villa, and I do not remember that Mr. M. had any help from an usher.

There were perhaps twenty boys in the school at most, and often fewer. I made the excursion between home and school four times a day; if I walked fast, the transit might take five minutes, and, as there were several objects of interest in the way, it might be spread over an hour. In fine weather the going to and from school was very delightful, and small as the scope of it was, it could be varied almost indefinitely. I would sometimes meet with a schoolfellow proceeding in the same direction, and my Father, observing us over the wall one morning, was amused to notice that I always progressed by dancing along the curbstone sideways, my face turned inwards and my arms beating against my legs, conversing loudly all the time. This was a case of pure heredity, for so he used to go to his school, forty years before, along the streets of Poole.

One day when fortunately I was alone, I was accosted by an old gentleman, dressed as a dissenting minister. He was pleased with my replies, and he presently made it a habit to be taking his constitutional when I was likely to be on the high road. We became great friends, and he took me at last to his house, a very modest place, where to my great amazement, there hung in the dining-room, two large portraits, one of a man, the other of a woman, in extravagant fancy-dress. My old friend told me that the former was a picture of himself as he had appeared, 'long ago, in my unconverted days, on the stage'.

I was so ignorant as not to have the slightest conception of what was meant by the stage, and he explained to me that he had been an actor and a poet, before the Lord had opened his eyes to better things. I knew nothing about actors, but poets were already the objects of my veneration. My friend was the first poet I had ever seen. He was no less a person than James Sheridan Knowles, the famous author of Virginius and The Hunchback, who had become a Baptist minister in his old age. When, at home, I mentioned this acquaintance, it awakened no interest. I believe that my Father had never heard, or never noticed, the name of one who had been by far the most eminent English playwright of that age.

It was from Sheridan Knowles' lips that I first heard fall the name of Shakespeare. He was surprised, I fancy, to find me so curiously advanced in some branches of knowledge, and so utterly ignorant of others. He could hardly credit that the names of Hamlet and Falstaff and Prospero meant nothing to a little boy who knew so much theology and geography as I did. Mr. Knowles suggested that I should ask my schoolmaster to read some of the plays of Shakespeare with the boys, and he proposed The Merchant of Venice as particularly well-suited for this purpose. I repeated what my aged friend (Mr. Sheridan Knowles must have been nearly eighty at that time) had said, and Mr. M. accepted the idea with promptitude. (All my memories of this my earliest schoolmaster present him to me as intelligent, amiable and quick, although I think not very soundly prepared for his profession.)

Accordingly, it was announced that the reading of Shakespeare would be one of our lessons, and on the following afternoon we began The Merchant of Venice. There was one large volume, and it was handed about the class; I was permitted to read the part of Bassanio, and I set forth, with ecstatic pipe, how

In Belmont is a lady richly left, And she is fair, and fairer than that word!

Mr. M. must have had some fondness for the stage himself; his pleasure in the Shakespeare scenes was obvious, and nothing else that he taught me made so much impression on me as what he said about a proper emphasis in reading aloud. I was in the seventh heaven of delight, but alas! we had only reached the second act of the play, when the readings mysteriously stopped. I never knew the cause, but I suspect that it was at my Father's desire. He prided himself on never having read a page of Shakespeare, and on never having entered a theatre but once. I think I must have spoken at home about the readings, and that he must have given the schoolmaster a hint to return to the ordinary school curriculum.

The fact that I was 'a believer', as it was our custom to call one who had been admitted to the arcana of our religion, and that therefore, in all commerce with 'unbelievers', it was my duty to be 'testifying for my Lord, in season and out of season'—this prevented my forming any intimate friendships at my first school. I shrank from the toilsome and embarrassing act of button-holing a schoolfellow as he rushed out of class, and of pressing upon him the probably unintelligible question 'Have you found Jesus?' It was simpler to avoid him, to slip like a lizard though the laurels and emerge into solitude.

The boys had a way of plunging out into the road in front of the school-villa when afternoon school was over; it was a pleasant rural road lined with high hedges and shadowed by elm-trees. Here, especially towards the summer twilight, they used to linger and play vague games, swooping and whirling in the declining sunshine, and I was glad to join these bat-like sports. But my company, though not avoided, was not greatly sought for. I think that something of my curious history was known, and that I was, not unkindly but instinctively, avoided, as an animal of a different species, not allied to the herd. The conventionality of little boys is constant; the colour of their traditions is uniform. At the same time, although I made no friends, I found no enemies. In class, except in my extraordinary aptitude for geography, which was looked upon as incomprehensible and almost uncanny, I was rather behind than in front of the others. I, therefore, awakened no jealousies, and, intent on my own dreams, I think my little shadowy presence escaped the notice of most of my schoolfellows.

By the side of the road I have mentioned, between the school and my home, there was a large horse-pond. The hedge folded around three sides of it, while ancient pollard elms bent over it, and chequered with their foliage in it the reflection of the sky. The roadside edge of this pond was my favourite station; it consisted of a hard clay which could be moulded into fairly tenacious forms. Here I created a maritime empire—islands, a seaboard with harbours, light-houses, fortifications. My geographical imitativeness had its full swing. Sometimes, while I was creating, a cart would be driven roughly into the pond, and a horse would drink deep of my ocean, his hooves trampling my archipelagoes and shattering my ports with what was worse than a typhoon. But I immediately set to work, as soon as the cart was gone and the mud had settled, to tidy up my coastline again and to scoop out anew my harbours.

My pleasure in this sport was endless, and what I was able to see, in my mind's eye, was not the edge of a morass of mud, but a splendid line of coast, and gulfs of the type of Tor Bay. I do not recollect a sharper double humiliation than when old Sam Lamble, the blacksmith, who was one of the 'saints', being asked by my Father whether he had met me, replied 'Yes, I zeed 'un up- long, making mud pies in the ro-ad!' What a position for one who had been received into communion 'as an adult'! What a blot on the scutcheon of a would-be Columbus! 'Mud-pies', indeed!

Yet I had an appreciator. One afternoon, as I was busy on my geographical operations, a good-looking middle-aged lady, with a soft pink cheek and a sparkling hazel eye, paused and asked me if my name was not what it was. I had seen her before; a stranger to our parts, with a voice without a trace in it of the Devonshire drawl. I knew, dimly, that she came sometimes to the meeting, that she was lodging at Upton with some friends of ours who accepted paying guests in an old house that was simply a basket of roses. She was Miss Brightwen, and I now conversed with her for the first time.

Her interest in my harbours and islands was marked; she did not smile; she asked questions about my peninsulas which were intelligent and pertinent. I was even persuaded at last to leave my creations and to walk with her towards the village. I was pleased with her voice, her refinements, her dress, which was more delicate, and her manners, which were more easy, than what I was accustomed to, We had some very pleasant conversation, and when we parted I had the satisfaction of feeling that our intercourse had been both agreeable to me and instructive to her. I told her that I should be glad to tell her more on a future occasion; she thanked me very gravely, and then she laughed a little. I confess I did not see that there was anything to laugh at. We parted on warm terms of mutual esteem, but I little thought that this sympathetic Quakerish lady was to become my mother.

CHAPTER X

I SLEPT in a little bed in a corner of the room, and my Father in the ancestral four-poster nearer to the door. Very early one bright September morning at the close of my eleventh year, my Father called me over to him. I climbed up, and was snugly wrapped in the coverlid; and then we held a momentous conversation. It began abruptly by his asking me whether I should like to have a new mamma. I was never a sentimentalist, and I therefore answered, cannily, that that would depend on who she was. He parried this, and announced that, anyway, a new mamma was coming; I was sure to like her. Still in a noncommittal mood, I asked: 'Will she go with me to the back of the lime-kiln?' This question caused my Father a great bewilderment. I had to explain that the ambition of my life was to go up behind the lime-kiln on the top of the hill that hung over Barton, a spot which was forbidden ground, being locally held one of extreme danger. 'Oh! I daresay she will,' my Father then said, 'but you must guess who she is.' I guessed one or two of the less comely of the female 'saints', and, this embarrassing my Father,—since the second I mentioned was a married woman who kept a sweet-shop in the village,—he cut my inquiries short by saying, 'It is Miss Brightwen.'

So far so good, and I was well pleased. But unfortunately I remembered that it was my duty to testify 'in season and out of season'. I therefore asked, with much earnestness, 'But, Papa, is she one of the Lord's children?' He replied, with gravity, that she was. 'Has she taken up her cross in baptism?' I went on, for this was my own strong point as a believer. My Father looked a little shame-faced, and replied: 'Well, she has not as yet seen the necessity of that, but we must pray that the Lord may make her way clear before her. You see, she has been brought up, hitherto, in the so-called Church of England.' Our positions were now curiously changed. It seemed as if it were I who was the jealous monitor, and my Father the deprecating penitent. I sat up in the coverlid, and I shook a finger at him. 'Papa,' I said, 'don't tell me that she's a pedobaptist?' I had lately acquired that valuable word, and I seized this remarkable opportunity of using it. It affected my Father painfully, but he repeated his assurance that if we united our prayers, and set the Scripture plan plainly before Miss Brightwen, there could be no doubt that she would see her way to accepting the doctrine of adult baptism. And he said we must judge not, lest we ourselves bejudged. I had just enough tact to let that pass, but I was quite aware that our whole system was one of judging, and that we had no intention whatever of being judged ourselves. Yet even at the age of eleven one sees that on certain occasions to press home the truth is not convenient.

Just before Christmas, on a piercing night of frost, my Father brought to us his bride. The smartening up of the house, the new furniture, the removal of my own possessions to a private bedroom, the wedding-gifts of the 'saints', all these things paled in interest before the fact that Miss Marks had 'made a scene', in the course of the afternoon. I was dancing about the drawing-room, and was saying: 'Oh! I am so glad my new Mamma is coming,' when Miss Marks called out, in an unnatural voice, 'Oh! you cruel child.' I stopped in amazement and stared at her, whereupon she threw prudence to the winds, and moaned: 'I once thought I should be your dear mamma.' I was simply stupefied, and I expressed my horror in terms that were clear and strong. Thereupon Miss Marks had a wild fit of hysterics, while I looked on, wholly unsympathetic and still deeply affronted. She was right; I was cruel, alas! but then, what a silly woman she had been! The consequence was that she withdrew in a moist and quivering condition to her boudoir, where she had locked herself in when I, all smiles and caresses, was welcoming the bride and bridegroom on the doorstep as politely as if I had been a valued old family retainer.

My stepmother immediately became a great ally of mine. She was never a tower of strength to me, but at least she was always a lodge in my garden of cucumbers. She was a very well-meaning pious lady, but she was not a fanatic, and her mind did not naturally revel in spiritual aspirations. Almost her only social fault was that she was sometimes a little fretful; this was the way in which her bruised individuality asserted itself. But she was affectionate, serene, and above all refined. Her refinement was extraordinarily pleasant to my nerves, on which much else in our surroundings jarred.

How life may have jarred, poor insulated lady, on her during her first experience of our life at the Room, I know not, but I think she was a philosopher. She had, with surprising rashness, and in opposition to the wishes of every member of her own family, taken her cake, and now she recognized that she must eat it, to the last crumb. Over her wishes and prejudices my Father exercised a constant, cheerful and quiet pressure. He was never unkind or abrupt, but he went on adding avoirdupois until her will gave way under the sheer weight. Even to public immersion, which, as was natural in a shy and sensitive lady of advancing years, she regarded with a horror which was long insurmountable,—even to baptism she yielded, and my Father had the joy to announce to the Saints one Sunday morning at the breaking of bread that 'my beloved wife has been able at length to see the Lord's Will in the matter of baptism, and will testify to the faith which is in her on Thursday evening next.' No wonder my stepmother was sometimes fretful.

On the physical side, I owe her an endless debt of gratitude. Her relations, who objected strongly to her marriage, had told her, among other pleasant prophecies, that 'the first thing you will have to do will be to bury that poor child'. Under the old-world sway of Miss Marks, I had slept beneath a load of blankets, had never gone out save weighted with great coat and comforter, and had been protected from fresh air as if from a pestilence. With real courage my stepmother reversed all this. My bedroom window stood wide open all night long, wraps were done away with, or exchanged for flannel garments next the skin, and I was urged to be out and about as much as possible.

All the quidnuncs among the 'saints' shook their heads; Mary Grace Burmington, a little embittered by the downfall of her Marks, made a solemn remonstrance to my Father, who, however, allowed my stepmother to carry out her excellent plan. My health responded rapidly to this change of regime, but increase of health did not bring increase of spirituality. My Father, fully occupied with moulding the will and inflaming the piety of my stepmother, left me now, to a degree not precedented, in undisturbed possession of my own devices. I did not lose my faith, but many other things took a prominent place in my mind.

It will, I suppose, be admitted that there is no greater proof of complete religious sincerity than fervour in private prayer. If an individual, alone by the side of his bed, prolongs his intercessions, lingers wrestling with his divine Companion, and will not leave off until he has what he believes to be evidence of a reply to his entreaties—then, no matter what the character of his public protestations, or what the frailty of his actions, it is absolutely certain that he believes in what he professes.

My Father prayed in private in what I may almost call a spirit of violence. He entreated for spiritual guidance with nothing less than importunity. It might be said that he stormed the citadels of God's grace, refusing to be baffled, urging his intercessions without mercy upon a Deity who sometimes struck me as inattentive to his prayers or wearied by them. My Father's acts of supplication, as I used to witness them at night, when I was supposed to be asleep, were accompanied by stretchings out of the hands, by crackings of the joints of the fingers, by deep breathings, by murmurous sounds which seemed just breaking out of silence, like Virgil's bees out of the hive, 'magnis clamoribus'. My Father fortified his religious life by prayer as an athlete does his physical life by lung-gymnastics and vigorous rubbings.

It was a trouble to my conscience that I could not emulate this fervour. The poverty of my prayers had now long been a source of distress to me, but I could not discover how to enrich them. My Father used to warn us very solemnly against 'lip-service', by which he meant singing hymns of experience and joining in ministrations in which our hearts took no vital or personal part. This was an outward act, the tendency of which I could well appreciate, but there was a 'lip-service' even more deadly than that, against which it never occurred to him to warn me. It assailed me when I had come alone by my bedside, and had blown out the candle, and had sunken on my knees in my night-gown. Then it was that my deadness made itself felt, in the mechanical address I put up, the emptiness of my language, the absence of all real unction.

I never could contrive to ask God for spiritual gifts in the same voice and spirit in which I could ask a human being for objects which I knew he could give me and which I earnestly desired to possess. That sense of the reality of intercession was for ever denied me, and it was, I now see, the stigma of my want of faith. But at the time, of course, I suspected nothing of the kind, and I tried to keep up my zeal by a desperate mental flogging, as if my soul had been a peg-top.

In nothing did I gain from the advent of my stepmother more than in the encouragement she gave to my friendships with a group of boys of my own age, of whom I had now lately formed the acquaintance. These friendships she not merely tolerated, but fostered; it was even due to her kind arrangements that they took a certain set form, that our excursions started from this house or from that on regular days. I hardly know by what stages I ceased to be a lonely little creature of mock-monographs and mud- pies, and became a member of a sort of club of eight or ten active boys. The long summer holidays of 1861 were set in an enchanting brightness.

Looking back, I cannot see a cloud on the terrestrial horizon—I see nothing but a blaze of sunshine; descents of slippery grass to moons of snow-white shingle, cold to the bare flesh; red promontories running out into a sea that was like sapphire; and our happy clan climbing, bathing, boating, lounging, chattering, all the hot day through. Once more I have to record the fact, which I think is not without interest, that precisely as my life ceases to be solitary, it ceases to be distinct. I have no difficulty in recalling, with the minuteness of a photograph, scenes in which my Father and I were the sole actors within the four walls of a room, but of the glorious life among wild boys on the margin of the sea I have nothing but vague and broken impressions, delicious and illusive.

It was a remarkable proof of my Father's temporary lapse into indulgence that he made no effort to thwart my intimacy with these my new companions. He was in an unusually humane mood himself. His marriage was one proof of it; another was the composition at this time of the most picturesque, easy and graceful of all his writings, The Romance of Natural History, even now a sort of classic. Everything combined to make him believe that the blessing of the Lord was upon him, and to clothe the darkness of the world with at least a mist of rose-colour. I do not recollect that ever at this time he bethought him, when I started in the morning for a long day with my friends on the edge of the sea, to remind me that I must speak to them, in season and out of season, of the Blood of Jesus. And I, young coward that I was, let sleeping dogmas lie.

My companions were not all of them the sons of saints in our communion; their parents belonged to that professional class which we were only now beginning to attract to our services. They were brought up in religious, but not in fanatical, families, and I was the only 'converted' one among them. Mrs. Paget, of whom I shall have presently to speak, characteristically said that it grieved her to see 'one lamb among so many kids'. But 'kid' is a word of varied significance and the symbol did not seem to us effectively applied. As a matter of fact, we made what I still feel was an excellent tacit compromise. My young companions never jeered at me for being 'in communion with the saints', and I, on my part, never urged the Atonement upon them. I began, in fact, more and more to keep my own religion for use on Sundays.

It will, I hope, have been observed that among the very curious grown-up people into whose company I was thrown, although many were frail and some were foolish, none, so far as I can discern, were hypocritical. I am not one of those who believe that hypocrisy is a vice that grows on every bush. Of course, in religious more than in any other matters, there is a perpetual contradiction between our thoughts and our deeds which is inevitable to our social order, and is bound to lead to cette tromperie mutuelle of which Pascal speaks. But I have often wondered, while admiring the splendid portrait of Tartuffe, whether such a monster ever, or at least often, has walked the stage of life; whether Moliere observed, or only invented him.

To adopt a scheme of religious pretension, with no belief whatever in its being true, merely for sensuous advantage, openly acknowledging to one's inner self the brazen system of deceit,— such a course may, and doubtless has been, trodden, yet surely much less frequently than cynics love to suggest. But at the juncture which I have now reached in my narrative, I had the advantage of knowing a person who was branded before the whole world, and punished by the law of his country, as a felonious hypocrite. My Father himself could only sigh and admit the charge. And yet—I doubt.

About half-way between our village and the town there lay a comfortable villa inhabited by a retired solicitor, or perhaps attorney, whom I shall name Mr. Dormant. We often called at his half-way house, and, although he was a member of the town- meeting, he not unfrequently came up to us for 'the breaking of bread'. Mr. Dormant was a solid, pink man, of a cosy habit. He had beautiful white hair, a very soft voice, and a welcoming, wheedling manner; he was extremely fluent and zealous in using the pious phraseology of the sect. My Father had never been very much attracted to him, but the man professed, and I think felt, an overwhelming admiration for my Father. Mr. Dormant was not very well off, and in the previous year he had persuaded an aged gentleman of wealth to come and board with him. When, in the course of the winter, this gentleman died, much surprise was felt at the report that he had left almost his entire fortune, which was not inconsiderable, to Mr. Dormant.

Much surprise—for the old gentleman had a son to whom he had always been warmly attached, who was far away, I think in South America, practising a perfectly respectable profession of which his father entirely approved. My own Father always preserved a delicacy and a sense of honour about money which could not have been more sensitive if he had been an ungodly man, and I am very much pleased to remember that when the legacy was first spoken of, he regretted that Mr. Dormant should have allowed the old gentleman to make this will. If he knew the intention, my Father said, it would have shown a more proper sense of his responsibility if he had dissuaded the testator from so unbecoming a disposition. That was long before any legal question arose; and now Mr. Dormant came into his fortune, and began to make handsome gifts to missionary societies, and to his own meeting in the town. If I do not mistake, he gave, unsolicited, a sum to our building fund, which my Father afterwards returned. But in process of time we heard that the son had come back from the Antipodes, and was making investigations. Before we knew where we were, the news burst upon us, like a bomb-shell, that Mr. Dormant had been arrested on a criminal charge and was now in jail at Exeter.

Sympathy was at first much extended amongst us to the prisoner. But it was lessened when we understood that the old gentleman had been 'converted' while under Dormant's roof, and had given the fact that his son was 'an unbeliever' as a reason for disinheriting him. All doubt was set aside when it was divulged, under pressure, by the nurse who attended on the old gentleman, herself one of the 'saints', that Dormant had traced the signature to the will by drawing the fingers of the testator over the document when he was already and finally comatose.

My Father, setting aside by a strong effort of will the repugnance which he felt, visited the prisoner in gaol before this final evidence had been extracted. When he returned he said that Dormant appeared to be enjoying a perfect confidence of heart, and had expressed a sense of his joy and peace in the Lord; my Father regretted that he had not been able to persuade him to admit any error, even of judgement. But the prisoner's attitude in the dock, when the facts were proved, and not by him denied, was still more extraordinary. He could be induced to exhibit no species of remorse, and, to the obvious anger of the judge himself, stated that he had only done his duty as a Christian, in preventing this wealth from coming into the hands of an ungodly man, who would have spent it in the service of the flesh and of the devil. Sternly reprimanded by the judge, he made the final statement that at that very moment he was conscious of his Lord's presence, in the dock at his side, whispering to him 'Well done, thou good and faithful servant!' In this frame of conscience, and with a glowing countenance, he was hurried away to penal servitude.

This was a very painful incident, and it is easy to see how compromising, how cruel, it was in its effect upon our communion; what occasion it gave to our enemies to blaspheme. No one, in either meeting, could or would raise a voice to defend Mr. Dormant. We had to bow our heads when we met our enemies in the gate. The blow fell more heavily on the meeting of which he had been a prominent and communicating member, but it fell on us too, and my Father felt it severely. For many years he would never mention the man's name, and he refused all discussion of the incident.

Yet I was never sure, and I am not sure now, that the wretched being was a hypocrite. There are as many vulgar fanatics as there are distinguished ones, and I am not convinced that Dormant, coarse and narrow as he was, may not have sincerely believed that it was better for the money to be used in religious propaganda than in the pleasures of the world, of which he doubtless formed a very vague idea. On this affair I meditated much, and it awakened in my mind, for the first time, a doubt whether our exclusive system of ethics was an entirely salutary one, if it could lead the conscience of a believer to tolerate such acts as these, acts which my Father himself had denounced as dishonourable and disgraceful.

My stepmother brought with her a little library of such books as we had not previously seen, but which yet were known to all the world except us. Prominent among these was a set of the poems of Walter Scott, and in his unwonted geniality and provisional spirit of compromise, my Father must do no less than read these works aloud to my stepmother in the quiet spring evenings. This was a sort of aftermath of courtship, a tribute of song to his bride, very sentimental and pretty. She would sit, sedately, at her workbox, while he, facing her, poured forth the verses at her like a blackbird. I was not considered in this arrangement, which was wholly matrimonial, but I was present, and the exercise made more impression upon me than it did upon either of the principal agents. My Father read the verse admirably, with a full,—some people (but not I) might say with a too full—perception of the metre as well as of the rhythm, rolling out the rhymes, and glorying in the proper names. He began, and it was a happy choice, with 'The Lady of the Lake'. It gave me singular pleasure to hear his large voice do justice to 'Duncrannon' and 'Cambus- Kenneth', and wake the echoes with 'Rhoderigh Vich Alphine dhu, ho! ieroe!' I almost gasped with excitement, while a shudder floated down my backbone, when we came to:

A sharp and shrieking echo gave, Coir-Uriskin, thy goblin cave! And the grey pass where birches wave, On Beala-nam-bo,

a passage which seemed to me to achieve the ideal of sublime romance. My thoughts were occupied all day long with the adventures of Fitzjames and the denizens of Ellen's Isle. It became an obsession, and when I was asked whether I remembered the name of the cottage where the minister of the Bible Christians lodged, I answered, dreamily, 'Yes,—Beala-nambo.'

Seeing me so much fascinated, thrown indeed into a temporary frenzy, by the epic poetry of Sir Walter Scott, my stepmother asked my Father whether I might not start reading the Waverley Novels. But he refused to permit this, on the ground that those tales gave false and disturbing pictures of life, and would lead away my attention from heavenly things. I do not fully apprehend what distinction he drew between the poems, which he permitted, and the novels, which he refused. But I suppose he regarded a work in verse as more artificial, and therefore less likely to make a realistic impression, than one in prose. There is something quaint in the conscientious scruple which allows The Lord of the Isles and excludes Rob Roy.

But stranger still, and amounting almost to a whim, was his sudden decision that, although I might not touch the novels of Scott, I was free to read those of Dickens. I recollect that my stepmother showed some surprise at this, and that my Father explained to her that Dickens 'exposes the passion of love in a ridiculous light.' She did not seem to follow this recommendation, which indeed tends to the ultra-subtle, but she procured for me a copy of Pickwick, by which I was instantly and gloriously enslaved. My shouts of laughing at the richer passages were almost scandalous, and led to my being reproved for disturbing my Father while engaged, in an upper room, in the study of God's Word. I must have expended months on the perusal of Pickwick, for I used to rush through a chapter, and then read it over again very slowly, word for word, and then shut my eyes to realize the figures and the action.

I suppose no child will ever again enjoy that rapture of unresisting humorous appreciation of 'Pickwick'. I felt myself to be in the company of a gentleman so extremely funny that I began to laugh before he began to speak; no sooner did he remark 'the sky was dark and gloomy, the air was damp and raw,' than I was in fits of hilarity. My retirement in our sequestered corner of life made me, perhaps, even in this matter, somewhat old-fashioned, and possibly I was the latest of the generation who accepted Mr. Pickwick with an unquestioning and hysterical abandonment. Certainly few young people now seem sensitive, as I was, and as thousands before me had been, to the quality of his fascination.

It was curious that living in a household where a certain delicate art of painting was diligently cultivated, I had yet never seen a real picture, and was scarcely familiar with the design of one in engraving. My stepmother, however, brought a flavour of the fine arts with her; a kind of aesthetic odour, like that of lavender, clung to her as she moved. She had known authentic artists in her youth; she had watched Old Crome painting, and had taken a course of drawing-lessons from no less a person than Cotman. She painted small watercolour landscapes herself, with a delicate economy of means and a graceful Norwich convention; her sketch-books were filled with abbeys gently washed in, river-banks in sepia by which the elect might be dimly reminded of Liber Studiorum, and woodland scenes over which the ghost of Creswick had faintly breathed. It was not exciting art, but it was, so far as it went, in its lady-like reserve, the real thing. Our sea-anemones, our tropic birds, our bits of spongy rock filled and sprayed with corallines, had been very conscientious and skilful, but, essentially, so far as art was concerned, the wrong thing.

Thus I began to acquire, without understanding the value of it, some conception of the elegant phases of early English watercolour painting, and there was one singular piece of a marble well brimming with water, and a greyish-blue sky over it, and dark-green poplars, shaped like wet brooms, menacing the middle distance, which Cotman himself had painted; and this seemed beautiful and curious to me in its dim, flat frame, when it was hoisted to a place on our drawing-room wall.

But still I had never seen a subject-picture, although my stepmother used to talk of the joys of the Royal Academy, and it was therefore with a considerable sense of excitement that I went, with my Father, to examine Mr. Holman Hunt's 'Finding of Christ in the Temple' which at this time was announced to be on public show at our neighbouring town. We paid our shillings and ascended with others to an upper room, bare of every disturbing object, in which a strong top-light raked the large and uncompromising picture. We looked at it for some time in silence, and then my Father pointed out to me various details, such as the phylacteries and the mitres, and the robes which distinguished the high priest.

Some of the other visitors, as I recollect, expressed astonishment and dislike of what they called the 'Preraphaelite' treatment, but we were not affected by that. Indeed, if anything, the exact, minute and hard execution of Mr. Hunt was in sympathy with the methods we ourselves were in the habit of using when we painted butterflies and seaweeds, placing perfectly pure pigments side by side, without any nonsense about chiaroscuro. This large, bright, comprehensive picture made a very deep impression upon me, not exactly as a work of art, but as a brilliant natural specimen. I was pleased to have seen it, as I was pleased to have seen the comet, and the whale which was brought to our front door on a truck. It was a prominent addition to my experience.

The slender expansions of my interest which were now budding hither and thither do not seem to have alarmed my Father at all. His views were short; if I appeared to be contented and obedient, if I responded pleasantly when he appealed to me, he was not concerned to discover the source of my cheerfulness. He put it down to my happy sense of joy in Christ, a reflection of the sunshine of grace beaming upon me through no intervening clouds of sin or doubt. The 'saints' were, as a rule, very easy to comprehend; their emotions lay upon the surface. If they were gay, it was because they had no burden on their consciences, while, if they were depressed, the symptom might be depended upon as showing that their consciences were troubling them, and if they were indifferent and cold, it was certain that they were losing their faith and becoming hostile to godliness. It was almost a mechanical matter with these simple souls. But, although I was so much younger, I was more complex and more crafty than the peasant 'saints'. My Father, not a very subtle psychologist, applied to me the same formulas which served him well at the chapel, but in my case the results were less uniformly successful.

The excitement of school-life and the enlargement of my circle of interests, combined to make Sunday, by contrast, a very tedious occasion. The absence of every species of recreation on the Lord's Day grew to be a burden which might scarcely be borne. I have said that my freedom during the week had now become considerable; if I was at home punctually at meal times, the rest of my leisure was not challenged. But this liberty, which in the summer holidays came to surpass that of 'fishes that tipple in the deep', was put into more and more painful contrast with the unbroken servitude of Sunday.

My Father objected very strongly to the expression Sabbath-day, as it is commonly used by Presbyterians and others. He said, quite justly, that it was an inaccurate modern innovation, that Sabbath was Saturday, the Seventh day of the week, not the first, a Jewish festival and not a Christian commemoration. Yet his exaggerated view with regard to the observance of the First Day, namely, that it must be exclusively occupied with public and private exercises of divine worship, was based much more upon a Jewish than upon a Christian law. In fact, I do not remember that my Father ever produced a definite argument from the New Testament in support of his excessive passivity on the Lord's Day. He followed the early Puritan practice, except that he did not extend his observance, as I believe the old Puritans did, from sunset on Saturday to sunset on Sunday.

The observance of the Lord's Day has already become universally so lax that I think there may be some value in preserving an accurate record of how our Sundays were spent five and forty years ago. We came down to breakfast at the usual time. My Father prayed briefly before we began the meal; after it, the bell was rung, and, before the breakfast was cleared away, we had a lengthy service of exposition and prayer with the servants. If the weather was fine, we then walked about the garden, doing nothing, for about half an hour. We then sat, each in a separate room, with our Bibles open and some commentary on the text beside us, and prepared our minds for the morning service. A little before 11 a.m. we sallied forth, carrying our Bibles and hymn- books, and went through the morning-service of two hours at the Room; this was the central event of Sunday.

We then came back to dinner,—curiously enough to a hot dinner, always, with a joint, vegetables and puddings, so that the cook at least must have been busily at work,—and after it my Father and my stepmother took a nap, each in a different room, while I slipped out into the garden for a little while, but never venturing farther afield. In the middle of the afternoon, my stepmother and I proceeded up the village to Sunday School, where I was early promoted to the tuition of a few very little boys. We returned in time for tea, immediately after which we all marched forth, again armed as in the morning, with Bibles and hymn-books, and we went though the evening-service, at which my Father preached. The hour was now already past my weekday bedtime, but we had another service to attend, the Believers' Prayer Meeting, which commonly occupied forty minutes more. Then we used to creep home, I often so tired that the weariness was like physical pain, and I was permitted, without further 'worship', to slip upstairs to bed.

What made these Sundays, the observance of which was absolutely uniform, so peculiarly trying was that I was not permitted the indulgence of any secular respite. I might not open a scientific book, nor make a drawing, nor examine a specimen. I was not allowed to go into the road, except to proceed with my parents to the Room, nor to discuss worldly subjects at meals, nor to enter the little chamber where I kept my treasures. I was hotly and tightly dressed in black, all day long, as though ready at any moment to attend a funeral with decorum. Sometimes, towards evening, I used to feel the monotony and weariness of my position to be almost unendurable, but at this time I was meek, and I bowed to what I supposed to be the order of the universe.

CHAPTER XI

As my mental horizon widened, my Father followed the direction of my spiritual eyes with some bewilderment, and knew not at what I gazed. Nor could I have put into words, nor can I even now define, the visions which held my vague and timid attention. As a child develops, those who regard it with tenderness or impatience are seldom even approximately correct in their analysis of its intellectual movements, largely because, if there is anything to record, it defies adult definition. One curious freak of mentality I must now mention, because it took a considerable part in the enfranchisement of my mind, or rather in the formation of my thinking habits. But neither my Father nor my stepmother knew what to make of it, and to tell the truth I hardly know what to make of it myself.

Among the books which my new mother had brought with her were certain editions of the poets, an odd assortment. Campbell was there, and Burns, and Keats, and the 'Tales' of Byron. Each of these might have been expected to appeal to me; but my emotion was too young, and I did not listen to them yet. Their imperative voices called me later. By the side of these romantic classics stood a small, thick volume, bound in black morocco, and comprising four reprinted works of the eighteenth century, gloomy, funereal poems of an order as wholly out of date as are the crossbones and ruffled cherubim on the gravestones in a country churchyard. The four—and in this order, as I never shall forget—were 'The Last Day' of Dr Young, Blair's 'Grave', 'Death' by Bishop Beilby Porteus, and 'The Deity' of Samuel Boyse. These lugubrious effusions, all in blank verse or in the heroic couplet, represented, in its most redundant form, the artistic theology of the middle of the eighteenth century. They were steeped in such vengeful and hortatory sentiments as passed for elegant piety in the reign of George II.

How I came to open this solemn volume is explained by the oppressive exclusiveness of our Sundays. On the afternoon of the Lord's Day, as I have already explained, I might neither walk, nor talk, nor explore our scientific library, nor indulge in furious feats of water-colour painting. The Plymouth-Brother theology which alone was open to me produced, at length, and particularly on hot afternoons, a faint physical nausea, a kind of secret headache. But, hitting one day upon the doleful book of verses, and observing its religious character, I asked 'May I read that?' and after a brief, astonished glance at the contents, received 'Oh certainly—if you can!'

The lawn sloped directly from a verandah at our drawing-room window, and it contained two immense elm trees, which had originally formed part of the hedge of a meadow. In our trim and polished garden they then remained—they were soon afterwards cut down—rude and obtuse, with something primeval about them, something autochthonous; they were like two peasant ancestors surviving in a family that had advanced to gentility. They rose each out of a steep turfed hillock, and the root of one of them was long my favourite summer reading-desk; for I could lie stretched on the lawn, with my head and shoulders supported by the elm-tree hillock, and the book in a fissure of the rough turf. Thither then I escaped with my graveyard poets, and who shall explain the rapture with which I followed their austere morality?

Whether I really read consecutively in my black-bound volume I can no longer be sure, but it became a companion whose society I valued, and at worst it was a thousand times more congenial to me than Jukes' 'On the Pentateuch' or than a perfectly excruciating work ambiguously styled 'The Javelin of Phineas', which lay smouldering in a dull red cover on the drawing-room table. I dipped my bucket here and there into my poets, and I brought up strange things. I brought up out of the depths of 'The Last Day' the following ejaculation of a soul roused by the trump of resurrection:

Father of mercies! Why from silent earth Didst thou awake, and curse me into birth? Tear me from quiet, ravish me from night, And make a thankless present of thy light? Push into being a reverse of thee, And animate a clod with misery?

I read these lines with a shiver of excitement, and in a sense I suppose little intended by the sanctimonious rector of Welwyn. I also read in the same piece the surprising description of how

Now charnels rattle, scattered limbs, and all The various bones, obsequious to the call, Self-mov'd, advance—the neck perhaps to meet The distant head, the distant legs the feet,

but rejected it as not wholly supported by the testimony of Scripture. I think that the rhetoric and vigorous advance of Young's verse were pleasant to me. Beilby Porteus I discarded from the first as impenetrable. In 'The Deity',—I knew nothing then of the life of its extravagant and preposterous author,—I took a kind of persistent, penitential pleasure, but it was Blair's 'Grave' that really delighted me, and I frightened myself with its melodious doleful images in earnest.

About this time there was a great flow of tea-table hospitality in the village, and my friends and their friends used to be asked out, by respective parents and by more than one amiable spinster, to faint little entertainments where those sang who were ambitious to sing, and where all played post and forfeits after a rich tea. My Father was constantly exercised in mind as to whether I should or should not accept these glittering invitations. There hovered before him a painful sense of danger in resigning the soul to pleasures which savoured of 'the world'. These, though apparently innocent in themselves, might give an appetite for yet more subversive dissipations. I remember, on one occasion,—when the Browns, a family of Baptists who kept a large haberdashery shop in the neighbouring town, asked for the pleasure of my company 'to tea and games', and carried complacency so far as to offer to send that local vehicle, 'the midge', to fetch me and bring me back,—my Father's conscience was so painfully perplexed, that he desired me to come up with him to the now-deserted 'boudoir' of the departed Marks, that we might 'lay the matter before the Lord'. We did so, kneeling side by side, with our backs to the window and our foreheads pressed upon the horsehair cover of the small, coffin-like sofa. My Father prayed aloud, with great fervour, that it might be revealed to me, by the voice of God, whether it was or was not the Lord's will that I should attend the Browns' party. My Father's attitude seemed to me to be hardly fair, since he did not scruple to remind the Deity of various objections to a life of pleasure and of the snakes that lie hidden in the grass of evening parties. It would have been more scrupulous, I thought, to give no sort of hint of the kind of answer he desired and expected.

It will be justly said that my life was made up of very trifling things, since I have to confess that this incident of the Browns' invitation was one of its landmarks. As I knelt, feeling very small, by the immense bulk of my Father, there gushed though my veins like a wine the determination to rebel. Never before, in all these years of my vocation, had I felt my resistance take precisely this definite form. We rose presently from the sofa, my forehead and the backs of my hands still chafed by the texture of the horsehair, and we faced one another in the dreary light. My Father, perfectly confident in the success of what had really been a sort of incantation, asked me in a loud wheedling voice, 'Well, and what is the answer which our Lord vouchsafes?' I said nothing, and so my Father, more sharply, continued, 'We have asked Him to direct you to a true knowledge of His will. We have desired Him to let you know whether it is, or is not, in accordance with His wishes that you should accept this invitation from the Browns.' He positively beamed down at me; he had no doubt of the reply. He was already, I believe, planning some little treat to make up to me for the material deprivation. But my answer came, in the high-piping accents of despair: 'The Lord says I may go to the Browns.' My Father gazed at me in speechless horror. He was caught in his own trap, and though he was certain that the Lord had said nothing of the kind, there was no road open for him but just sheer retreat. Yet surely it was an error in tactics to slam the door.

It was at this party at the Browns—to which I duly went, although in sore disgrace—that my charnel poets played me a mean trick. It was proposed that 'our young friends' should give their elders the treat of repeating any pretty pieces that they knew by heart. Accordingly a little girl recited 'Casabianca', and another little girl 'We are Seven', and various children were induced to repeat hymns, 'some rather long', as Calverley says, but all very mild and innocuously evangelical. I was then asked by Mrs. Brown's maiden sister, a gushing lady in corkscrew curls, who led the revels, whether I also would not indulge them 'by repeating some sweet stanzas'. No one more ready than I. Without a moment's hesitation, I stood forth, and in a loud voice I began one of my favourite passages from Blair's 'Grave':

If death were nothing, and nought after death— If when men died at once they ceased to be,— Returning to the barren Womb of Nothing Whence first they sprung, then might the debauchee...

'Thank you, dear, that will do nicely!' interrupted the lady with the curls. 'But that's only the beginning of it,' I cried. 'Yes. dear, but that will quite do! We won't ask you to repeat any more of it,' and I withdrew to the borders of the company in bewilderment. Nor did the Browns or their visitors ever learn what it was the debauchee might have said or done in more favourable circumstances.

The growing eagerness which I displayed for the society of selected schoolfellows and for such gentle dissipations as were within my reach exercised my Father greatly. His fancy rushed forward with the pace of a steam-engine, and saw me the life and soul of a gambling club, or flaunting it at the Mabille. He had no confidence in the action of moderating powers, and he was fond of repeating that the downward path is easy. If one fretted to be bathing with one's companions on the shingle, and preferred this exercise to the study of God's Word, it was a symbol of a terrible decline, the angle of which would grow steeper and steeper, until one plunged into perdition. He was, himself, timid and reclusive, and he shrank from all avoidable companionship with others, except on the footing of a master and teacher. My stepmother and I, who neither taught nor ruled, yearned for a looser chain and lighter relationships. With regard to myself, my Father about this time hit on a plan from which he hoped much, but from which little resulted. He looked to George to supply what my temperament seemed to require of congenial juvenile companionship.

If I have not mentioned 'George' until now, it is not that he was a new acquaintance. When we first came down into the country, our sympathy had been called forth by an accident to a little boy, who was knocked over by a horse, and whose thigh was broken. Somebody (I suppose Mary Grace, since my Father could rarely bring himself to pay these public visits) went to see the child in the infirmary, and accidentally discovered that he was exactly the same age that I was. This, and the fact that he was a meditative and sober little boy, attracted us all still further to George, who became converted under one of my Father's sermons. He attended my public baptism, and was so much moved by this ceremony that he passionately desired to be baptized also, and was in fact so immersed, a few months later, slightly to my chagrin, since I thereupon ceased to be the only infant prodigy in communion. When we were both in our thirteenth year, George became an outdoor servant to us, and did odd jobs under the gardener. My Father, finding him, as he said, 'docile, obedient and engaging', petted George a good deal, and taught him a little botany. He called George, by a curious contortion of thought, my 'spiritual foster-brother', and anticipated for him, I think, a career, like mine, in the Ministry.

Our garden suffered from an incursion of slugs, which laid the verbenas in the dust, and shore off the carnations as if with pairs of scissors. To cope with this plague we invested in a drake and a duck, who were christened Philemon and Baucis. Every night large cabbage-leaves, containing the lees of beer, were spread about the flower-beds as traps, and at dawn these had become green parlours crammed with intoxicated slugs. One of George's earliest morning duties was to free Philemon and Baucis from their coop, and, armed with a small wand, to guide their footsteps to the feast in one cabbage-leaf after another. My Father used to watch this performance from an upper window, and, in moments of high facetiousness, he was wont to parody the poet Gray:

How jocund doth George drive his team afield!

This is all, or almost all, that I remember about George's occupations, but he was singularly blameless.

My Father's plan now was that I should form a close intimacy with George, as a boy of my own age, of my own faith, of my own future. My stepmother, still in bondage to the social conventions, was passionately troubled at this, and urged the barrier of class-differences. My Father replied that such an intimacy would keep me 'lowly', and that from so good a boy as George I could learn nothing undesirable. 'He will encourage him not to wipe his boots when he comes into the house,' said my stepmother, and my Father sighed to think how narrow is the horizon of Woman's view of heavenly things.

In this caprice, if I may call it so, I think that my Father had before him the fine republican example of 'Sandford and Merton', some parts of which book he admired extremely. Accordingly George and I were sent out to take walks together, and as we started, my Father, with an air of great benevolence, would suggest some passage of Scripture, or 'some aspect of God's bountiful scheme in creation, on which you may profitably meditate together.' George and I never pursued the discussion of the text with which my Father started us for more than a minute or two; then we fell into silence, or investigated current scenes and rustic topics.

As is natural among the children of the poor, George was precocious where I was infantile, and undeveloped where I was elaborate. Our minds could hardly find a point at which to touch. He gave me, however, under cross-examination, interesting hints about rural matters, and I liked him, although I felt his company to be insipid. Sometimes he carried my books by my side to the larger and more distant school which I now attended, but I was always in a fever of dread lest my schoolfellows should see him, and should accuse me of having to be 'brought' to school. To explain to them that the companionship of this wholesome and rather blunt young peasant was part of my spiritual discipline would have been all beyond my powers.

It was soon after this that my stepmother made her one vain effort to break though the stillness of our lives. My Father's energy seemed to decline, to become more fitful, to take unseasonable directions. My mother instinctively felt that his peculiarities were growing upon him; he would scarcely stir from his microscope, except to go to the chapel, and he was visible to fewer and fewer visitors. She had taken a pleasure in his literary eminence, and she was aware that this, too, would slip from him; that, so persistently kept out of sight, he must soon be out of mind. I know not how she gathered courage for her tremendous effort, but she took me, I recollect, into her counsels. We were to unite to oblige my Father to start to his feet and face the world. Alas! we might as well have attempted to rouse the summit of Yes Tor into volcanic action. To my mother's arguments, my Father—with that baffling smile of his—replied: 'I esteem the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures of Egypt!' and that this answer was indirect made it none the less conclusive. My mother wished him to give lectures, to go to London, to read papers before the Royal Society, to enter into controversy with foreign savants, to conduct classes of outdoor zoology at fashionable watering-places. I held my breath with admiration as she poured forth her scheme, so daring, so brilliant, so sure to cover our great man with glory. He listened to her with an ambiguous smile, and shook his head at us, and resumed the reading of his Bible.

At the date of which I write these pages, the arts of illustration are so universally diffused that it is difficult to realize the darkness in which a remote English village was plunged half a century ago. No opportunity was offered to us dwellers in remote places of realizing the outward appearances of unfamiliar persons, scenes or things. Although ours was perhaps the most cultivated household in the parish, I had never seen so much as a representation of a work of sculpture until I was thirteen. My mother then received from her earlier home certain volumes, among which was a gaudy gift-book of some kind, containing a few steel engravings of statues.

These attracted me violently, and here for the first time I gazed on Apollo with his proud gesture, Venus in her undulations, the kirtled shape of Diana, and Jupiter voluminously bearded. Very little information, and that tome not intelligible, was given in the text, but these were said to be figures of the old Greek gods. I asked my Father to tell me about these 'old Greek gods'. His answer was direct and disconcerting. He said—how I recollect the place and time, early in the morning, as I stood beside the window in our garish breakfast-room—he said that the so-called gods of the Greeks were the shadows cast by the vices of the heathen, and reflected their infamous lives; 'it was for such things as these that God poured down brimstone and fire on the Cities of the Plain, and there is nothing in the legends of these gods, or rather devils, that it is not better for a Christian not to know.' His face blazed white with Puritan fury as he said this—I see him now in my mind's eye, in his violent emotion. You might have thought that he had himself escaped with horror from some Hellenic hippodrome.

My Father's prestige was by this time considerably lessened in my mind, and though I loved and admired him, I had now long ceased to hold him infallible. I did not accept his condemnation of the Greeks, although I bowed to it. In private I returned to examine my steel engravings of the statues, and I reflected that they were too beautiful to be so wicked as my Father thought they were. The dangerous and pagan notion that beauty palliates evil budded in my mind, without any external suggestion, and by this reflection alone I was still further sundered from the faith in which I had been trained. I gathered very diligently all I could pick up about the Greek gods and their statues; it was not much, it was indeed ludicrously little and false, but it was a germ. And at this aesthetic juncture I was drawn into what was really rather an extraordinary circle of incidents.

Among the 'Saints' in our village there lived a shoemaker and his wife, who had one daughter, Susan Flood. She was a flighty, excited young creature, and lately, during the passage of some itinerary revivalists, she had been 'converted' in the noisiest way, with sobs, gasps and gurglings. When this crisis passed, she came with her parents to our meetings, and was received quietly enough to the breaking of bread. But about the time I speak of, Susan Flood went up to London to pay a visit to an unconverted uncle and aunt. It was first whispered amongst us, and then openly stated, that these relatives had taken her to the Crystal Palace, where, in passing through the Sculpture Gallery, Susan's sense of decency had been so grievously affronted, that she had smashed the naked figures with the handle of her parasol, before her horrified companions could stop her. She had, in fact, run amok among the statuary, and had, to the intense chagrin of her uncle and aunt, very worthy persons, been arrested and brought before a magistrate, who dismissed her with a warning to her relations that she had better be sent home to Devonshire and 'looked after'. Susan Flood's return to us, however, was a triumph; she had no sense of having acted injudiciously or unbecomingly; she was ready to recount to every one, in vague and veiled language, how she had been able to testify for the Lord 'in the very temple of Belial', for so she poetically described the Crystal Palace. She was, of course, in a state of unbridled hysteria, but such physical explanations were not encouraged amongst us, and the case of Susan Flood awakened a great deal of sympathy.

There was held a meeting of the elders in our drawing-room to discuss it, and I contrived to be present, though out of observation. My Father, while he recognized the purity of Susan Flood's zeal, questioned its wisdom. He noted that the statuary was not her property, but that of the Crystal Palace. Of the other communicants, none, I think, had the very slightest notion what the objects were that Susan had smashed, or tried to smash, and frankly maintained that they thought her conduct magnificent. As for me, I had gathered by persistent inquiry enough information to know that what her sacrilegious parasol had attacked were bodies of my mysterious friends, the Greek gods, and if all the rest of the village applauded iconoclastic Susan, I at least would be ardent on the other side.

But I was conscious that there was nobody in the world to whom I could go for sympathy. If I had ever read 'Hellas' I should have murmured

Apollo, Pan and Love, And even Olympian Jove, Grew weak, when killing Susan glared on them.

On the day in question, I was unable to endure the drawing-room meeting to its close, but, clutching my volume of the Funereal Poets, I made a dash for the garden. In the midst of a mass of laurels, a clearing had been hollowed out, where ferns were grown and a garden-seat was placed. There was no regular path to this asylum; one dived under the snake-like boughs of the laurel and came up again in absolute seclusion.

Into this haunt I now fled to meditate about the savage godliness of that vandal, Susan Flood. So extremely ignorant was I that I supposed her to have destroyed the originals of the statues, marble and unique. I knew nothing about plaster casts, and I thought the damage (it is possible that there had really been no damage whatever) was of an irreparable character. I sank into the seat, with the great wall of laurels whispering around me, and I burst into tears. There was something, surely, quaint and pathetic in the figure of a little Plymouth Brother sitting in that advanced year of grace, weeping bitterly for indignities done to Hermes and to Aphrodite. Then I opened my book for consolation, and I read a great block of pompous verse out of 'The Deity', in the midst of which exercise, yielding to the softness of the hot and aromatic air, I fell fast asleep.

Among those who applauded the zeal of Susan Flood's parasol, the Pagets were prominent. These were a retired Baptist minister and his wife, from Exmouth, who had lately settled amongst us, and joined in the breaking of bread. Mr. Paget was a fat old man, whose round pale face was clean-shaven, and who carried a full crop of loose white hair above it; his large lips were always moving, whether he spoke or not. He resembled, as I now perceive, the portraits of S. T. Coleridge in age, but with all the intellect left out of them. He lived in a sort of trance of solemn religious despondency. He had thrown up his cure of souls, because he became convinced that he had committed the Sin against the Holy Ghost. His wife was younger than he, very small, very tight, very active, with black eyes like pin-pricks at the base of an extremely high and narrow forehead, bordered with glossy ringlets. He was very cross to her, and it was murmured that 'dear Mrs. Paget had often had to pass through the waters of affliction'. They were very poor, but rigidly genteel, and she was careful, so far as she could, to conceal from the world the caprices of her poor lunatic husband.

In our circle, it was never for a moment admitted that Mr. Paget was a lunatic. It was said that he had gravely sinned, and was under the Lord's displeasure; prayers were abundantly offered up that he might be led back into the pathway of light, and that the Smiling Face might be drawn forth for him from behind the Frowning Providence. When the man had an epileptic seizure in the High Street, he was not taken to a hospital, but we repeated to one another, with shaken heads, that Satan, that crooked Serpent, had been unloosed for a season. Mr. Paget was fond of talking, in private and in public, of his dreadful spiritual condition and he would drop his voice while he spoke of having committed the Unpardonable Sin, with a sort of shuddering exultation, such as people sometimes feel in the possession of a very unusual disease.

It might be thought that the position held in any community by persons so afflicted and eccentric as the Pagets would be very precarious. But it was not so with us; on the contrary, they took a prominent place at once. Mr. Paget, in spite of his spiritual bankruptcy, was only too anxious to help my Father in his ministrations, and used to beg to be allowed to pray and exhort. In the latter case he took the tone of a wounded veteran, who, though fallen on the bloody field himself, could still encourage younger warriors to march forward to victory. Everybody longed to know what the exact nature had been of that sin against the Holy Ghost which had deprived Mr. Paget of every glimmer of hope for time or for eternity. It was whispered that even my Father himself was not precisely acquainted with the character of it.

This mysterious disability clothed Mr. Paget for us with a kind of romance. We watched him as the women watched Dante in Verona, whispering:

Behold him how Hell's reek Has crisped his hair and singed his cheek!

His person lacked, it is true, something of the dignity of Dante's, for it was his caprice to walk up and down the High Street at noonday with one of those cascades of coloured paper which were known as 'ornaments for your fireplace' slung over the back and another over the front of his body. These he manufactured for sale, and he adopted the quaint practice of wearing the exuberant objects as a means for their advertisement.

Mrs. Paget had been accustomed to rule in the little ministry from which Mr. Paget's celebrated Sin had banished them, and she was inclined to clutch at the sceptre now. She was the only person I ever met with who was not afraid of the displeasure of my Father. She would fix her viper-coloured eyes on his, and say with a kind of gimlet firmness, 'I hardly think that is the true interpretation, Brother G.', or, 'But let us turn to Colossians, and see what the Holy Ghost says there upon this matter.' She fascinated my Father, who was not accustomed to this kind of interruption, and as she was not to be softened by any flattery (such as:—'Marvellous indeed, Sister, is your acquaintance with the means of grace!') she became almost a terror to him.

She abused her powers by taking great liberties, which culminated in her drawing his attention to the fact that my poor stepmother displayed 'an overweening love of dress'. The accusation was perfectly false; my stepmother was, if rather richly, always, plainly dressed, in the sober Quaker mode; almost her only ornament was a large carnelian brooch, set in flowered flat gold. To this the envenomed Paget drew my Father's attention as 'likely to lead "the little ones of the flock" into temptation'. My poor Father felt it his duty, thus directly admonished, to speak to my mother. 'Do you not think, my Love, that you should, as one who sets an example to others, discard the wearing of that gaudy brooch?' 'One must fasten one's collar with something, I suppose?' 'Well, but how does Sister Paget fasten her collar?' 'Sister Paget,' replied my Mother, stung at last into rejoinder, 'fastens her collar with a pin,—and that is a thing which I would rather die than do!'

Nor did I escape the attentions of this zealous reformer. Mrs. Paget was good enough to take a great interest in me, and she was not satisfied with the way in which I was being brought up. Her presence seemed to pervade the village, and I could neither come in nor go out without seeing her hard bonnet and her pursed-up lips. She would hasten to report to my Father that she saw me laughing and talking 'with a lot of unconverted boys', these being the companions with whom I had full permission to bathe and boat. She urged my Father to complete my holy vocation by some definite step, by which he would dedicate me completely to the Lord's service. Further schooling she thought needless, and merely likely to foster intellectual pride. Mr. Paget, she remarked, had troubled very little in his youth about worldly knowledge, and yet how blessed he had been in the conversion of souls until he had incurred the displeasure of the Holy Ghost!

I do not know exactly what she wanted my Father to do with me; perhaps she did not know herself; she was meddlesome, ignorant and fanatical, and she liked to fancy that she was exercising influence. But the wonderful, the inexplicable thing is that my Father,—who, with all his limitations, was so distinguished and high-minded,—should listen to her for a moment, and still more wonderful is it that he really allowed her, grim vixen that she was, to disturb his plans and retard his purposes. I think the explanation lay in the perfectly logical position she took up. My Father found himself brought face to face at last, not with a disciple, but with a trained expert in his own peculiar scheme of religion. At every point she was armed with arguments the source of which he knew and the validity of which he recognized. He trembled before Mrs. Paget as a man in a dream may tremble before a parody of his own central self, and he could not blame her without laying himself open somewhere to censure.