 4 Certainly the preceding year, in the seventh of my life, had been waited for us with comprehensive disaster. I have not yet mentioned that at the beginning of my mother's fatal illness misfortune came upon her brothers. I have never known the particulars of their ruin, but I believe in consequence of A's unsuccessful speculations and the fact that E had allowed the use of his name as a surety, both my uncles were obliged to fly from their creditors and take refuge in Paris. This happened just when our need was the sorest, and this, together with the poignancy of knowing that their sisters devoted labours for them had been all in vain, added to their unhappiness. It was doubtless also the reason why, having left England, they wrote to us no more, carefully concealing from us even their address, so that when my mother died my father was unable to communicate with them. I fear that they fell into dire distress before very long we learned that A had died, but it was fifteen years or more before we heard anything of E whose life had, at length, been preserved by the kindness of an old servant, but whose mind was now so clouded that he could recollect little or nothing of the past, and soon he also died. Amiable, gentle, without any species of practical ability, they were quite unfitted to struggle with the world, which had touched them only to wreck them. The flight of my uncles at this particular juncture left me without a relative on my mother's side at the time of her death. This isolation through my father into a sad perplexity, his only obvious source of income, but it happened to be a remarkably hopeful one, was an engagement to deliver a long series of lectures on marine natural history throughout the north and centre of England. These lectures were an entire novelty, nothing like them had been offered to the provincial public before, and the fact that the newly invented marine aquarium was the fashionable toy of the moment added to their attraction. My father was bowed down by sorrow and care, but he was not broken. His intellectual forces were at their height, and so was his popularity as an author. The lectures were to begin in March, my mother was buried, on 13 February. It seemed at first, in the inertia of bereavement, to be all beyond his powers to make the supreme effort, but the wholesome prick of need urged him on. It was a question of paying for food and clothes, of keeping a roof above our heads. The captain of a vessel in a storm must navigate his ship, although his wife lies dead in the cabin. That was my father's position in the spring of 1857. He had to stimulate, instruct, amuse large audiences of strangers, and seem gay, although affliction and loneliness had settled in his heart. He had to do this, or starve. But the difficulty still remained. During these months what was to become of me? My father could not take me with him from hotel to hotel, and from lecture hall to lecture hall, nor could he leave me, as people leave the domestic cat in an empty house for the neighbors to feed at intervals. The dilemma threatened to be insurmountable, when suddenly there descended upon us a kind, but little-known paternal cousin from the west of England, who had heard of our calamities. This lady had a large family of her own at Bristol. She offered to find room in it for me, so long as ever my father should be away in the north. And when my father, bewildered by so much goodness, hesitated, she came up to London and carried me forcibly away in a whirlwind of good nature. Her benevolence was quite spontaneous, and I am not sure that she had not attended to it already by helping to nurse our beloved sufferer through part of her illness. Of that I am not positive, but I recollect very clearly her snatching me from our cold and desolate hearthstone and carrying me off to her cheerful house at Clifton. Here, for the first time, when half through my eighth year I was thrown into the society of young people. My cousins were none of them, I believe, any longer children, but they were youths and maidens, busily engaged in various personal interests, all collected in a hive of wholesome family energy. Everybody was very kind to me, and I sank back, after the strain of so many months, into mere childhood again. This long visit to my cousins at Clifton must have been very delightful. I am dimly aware that it was, yet I remember but few of its incidents. My memory, so clear and vivid about earlier solitary times, now in all of society, becomes blurred and vague. I recollect certain pleasures being taken, for instance, to a menagerie and having a practical joke in the worst taste played upon me by the pelican. One of my cousins, who was a medical student, showed me a pistol and helped me to fire it. He smoked a pipe, and I was oddly conscious that both the firearm and the tobacco were definitely hostile to my dedication. My girl cousins took turns in putting me to bed, and on cold nights, or when they were in a hurry, allowed me to say my prayer under the bedclothes instead of kneeling at a chair. The result of this was further spiritual laxity, because I could not help going to sleep before the prayer was ended. The visit to Clifton was, in fact, a blessed interval in my strenuous childhood. It probably prevented my nerves from breaking down under the pressure of the previous months. The Clifton family was God-faring in a quiet, sensible way. But there was a total absence of all the intensity and compulsion of our religious life at Islington. I was not encouraged. I even remember that I was greatly snubbed when I rattled forth, parrot fashion, the conventional phraseology of the saints. For a short, enchanting period of respite, I lived the life of an ordinary little boy relapsing to a degree which would have filled my father with despair into childish thoughts and childish language. The result was that of this little happy breathing space I have nothing to report. Vague, half-blind remembrances of walks with my tall cousins waving like trees above me, pleasant noisy evenings in a great room on the ground floor, faint silver points of excursions into the country. All this is the very pale and shadowy testimony to a brief interval of healthy, happy child life when my hard-driven soul was allowed to have, for a little while, no history. The life of a child is so brief, its impressions are so illusory and fugitive, that it is as difficult to record its history as it would be to design a morning cloud sailing before the wind. It is short as we count shortness in after years when the drag of lead pulls down to earth the foot that used to flutter with a winged impetuosity and to float with the pulse of Hermes. But in memory my childhood was long, long with interminable hours, hours with the pale cheek pressed against the window-pane, hours of mechanical and repeated lonely games which had lost their savor, and were kept going by sheer inertness, not unhappy, not fretful, but long, long, long. It seems to me as I look back to life in the motherless Islington house as I resumed it in that slow eighth year of my life, the time had ceased to move. There was a whole age between one tick of the eight-day clock in the hall and the next tick. When the milkman went his rounds in our grey street, with his eldritch scream over the top of each set of area railings, it seemed as though he would never disappear again. There was no past and no future for me, and the present felt as though it were sealed up in laden jar. Even my dreams were interminable and hung stationary from the nightly sky. At this time the street was my theatre, and I spent long periods, as I have said, leaning against the window. I feel now that coldness of the pain and the feverish heat that was produced by contrast in the orbit round the eye. Now and then amusing things happened. The onion man was a joy long waited for. This worthy was a tall and bony journey protestant with a raucous voice who strode up our street several times a week carrying a yoke across his shoulders, from the ends of which hung ropes of onions. He used to shout, utter abrupt intervals in a tone which might wake the dead. Here's your rope to hang the pope and a pen-earth of cheese to choke him. The cheese appeared to be legendary. He sold only onions. My father did not eat onions, but he encouraged this terrible fellow with his wild eyes and long strips of hair because of his godly attitudes towards the papacy, and I used to watch him dart out of the front door, present his penny, and retire, graciously waving back the proffered onion. On the other hand, my father did not approve of a fat sailor who was a constant passer-by. This man, who was probably crazed, used to wall very slowly up the center of our street, vociferating with the voice of a bowl, watch and pray, hey, night and day, hey. This melancholy admonition was the entire business of his life. He did nothing at all but walk up and down the streets of Islington, exhorting the inhabitants to watch and pray. I do not recollect that the sailor man stopped to collect pennies, and my impression is that he was, after his fashion, a volunteer evangelist. The tragedy of Mr. Punch was another and a still greater delight. I was never allowed to go out into the street to mingle with the little crowd which gathered under the stage, and as I was extremely nearsighted, the impression I received was vague. But when, by happy chance, the show stopped opposite our door, I saw enough of that ancient drama to be thrilled with terror and delight, I was much affected by the internal troubles of the Punch family. I thought that with a little more tact on the part of Mrs. Punch and some restraint held over a temper, naturally violent by Mr. Punch, a great deal of this sad misunderstanding might have been prevented. The momentous close, when a figure of shapeless horror appears on the stage, and quells the hitherto undaunted Mr. Punch, was, to me, the bouquet of the entire performance. When Mr. Punch, losing his nerve, points to the shape and says in an awestruck squeaking whisper, who's that? Is it the butcher? And the stern answer comes, no, Mr. Punch, and then, is it the baker? No, Mr. Punch, who is it then? This in a squeak trembling with emotion and terror, and then the full loud reply, booming like a judgment bell, it is the devil come to take you down to hell. And the form of Punch with kicking legs, sunken in epilepsy on the floor, all this was solemn and exquisite to me beyond words. I was not amused. I was deeply moved and exhilarated, purged as the old phrase hath it, with pity and terror. Another joy, in a lighter key, was watching a fantastic old man, who came slowly up the street, hung about with drums and flutes and kites and colored balls, and bearing over his shoulders a great sack. Children and servant girls used to bolt up out of areas and chaffer with a scotty person, who would presently trudge on, always repeating the same set of words, here's your toys for girls and boys, for bits of brass and broken glass, these four lines being spoken in a breathless hurry, a penny or a vile bottle, this being drawled out in an endless wail. I was not permitted to go forth and trade with this old person, but sometimes our servant-mate did, thereby making me feel that if I did not hold the rose of merchandise, I was very near it. My experiences with my cousins at Clifton had given me the habit of looking out into the world, even though it was only into the pale world of our quiet street. My father and I were now great friends. I do not doubt that he felt his responsibility to fill, as far as might be, the gap which the death of my mother had made in my existence. I spent a large portion of my time in his study while he was writing or drawing, and though very little conversation passed between us, I think that each enjoyed the companionship of the other. There were two, and sometimes three, aquaria in the room, tanks of sea water with glass slides, inside which all sorts of creatures crawled and swam. These were sources of endless pleasure to me, and at this time began to be laid upon me the occasional task of watching and afterwards reporting the habits of animals. At other times I dragged a folio volume of the penny cyclopedia up to the study with me, and sat there reading successive articles on subjects as parrots, parthians, passion flowers, Passover, and pastry, without any invidious preferences, all information being equally welcome and equally fugitive. That something of all this loose stream of knowledge clung to odd cells in the back of my brain seems to be shown by the fact that to this day I occasionally find myself aware of some stray useless fact about peonies, or pemicon, or pepper, which I can only trace back to the penny cyclopedia of my infancy. It will be asked what the attitude of my father's mind was to me and of mine to his, as regards religion at this time when we were thrown together alone so much, it is difficult to reply with exactitude. But so far as the former is concerned, I think that the extreme violence of the spiritual emotions to which my father had been subjected had now been followed by a certain reaction. He had not changed his views in any respect, and he was prepared to work out the results of them with greater zeal than ever, but just at present his religious nature, like his physical nature, was tired out with anxiety and sorrow. He accepted the supposition that I was entirely with him in all respect so far, that is to say, as a being so rudimentary and feeble as a little child could be. My mother, in her last hours, had dwelt on our unity in God. We were drawn together, she said, elect from the world in a triplicity of faith and joy. She had constantly repeated the words, We shall be one family, one song. One song, one family, my father, I think, accepted this as a prophecy. He felt no doubt of our triple unity. My mother had now merely passed before us through a door into a world of light where we should presently join her, where all things would be radiant and blissful, but where we three would, in some unknown way, be particularly drawn together in a tie of inexpressible beatitude. He fretted at the delay he would have taken me by the hand, and have joined her in the realms of holiness and light at once, without this dreary dalliance with earthly cares. He held this confidence and vision steadily before him, but nothing availed against the melancholy of his natural state. He was conscious of his dull and solitary condition, and he saw, too, that it enveloped me. I think his heart was, at this time, drawn out towards me in an immense tenderness. Sometimes when the early twilight descended upon us in the study, he could no longer peer with advantage into the depths of his microscope. He would beckon me to him silently and fold me closely in his arms. I used to turn my face up to his, patiently and wonderingly, while the large, unwilling tears gathered in the corners of his eyelids. My training had given me a pregenatural faculty of stillness, and we would stay so without a word or movement, until the darkness filled the room, and then, with my little hand in his, we would walk sedately downstairs to the parlor, where we would find that the lamp was lighted, and that our melancholy vigil was ended. I do not think that at any part of our lives my father and I were drawn so close to one another as we were in that summer of 1857, yet we seldom spoke of what lay so warm and fragrant between us the flower-like thought of our departed. The visit to my cousins had made one considerable change in me. Under the old solitary discipline my intelligence had grown at the expense of my sentiment. I was innocent, but inhuman. The long suffering and the death of my mother had awakened my heart, had taught me what pain was, but had left me savage and morose. I had still no idea of the relations of human beings to one another. I had learned no word of that philosophy which comes to children of the poor in the struggle of the street, and to the children of the well-to-do in the clash of the nursery. In other words, I had no humanity. I had been carefully shielded from the chance of catching it, as though it were the most dangerous of microbes. But now that I had enjoyed a little of the common experience of childhood, a great change had come upon me. Before I went to Clifton my mental life was all interior, a rack of baseless dream upon dream. But now I was eager to look out of the window to go out in the streets. I was taken with a curiosity about human life. Even from my vantage of the windowpane I watched boys and girls go by with an interest which began to be almost wistful. Still I continued to have no young companions, but on summer evenings I used to drag my father out, taking the initiative myself, stamping and playful inpatience at his irresolution, fetching his hat and stick and waiting. We used to sally forth at last together, hand in hand, descending the Caledonian road, with all its shops as far as Mother Shipton or else winding among the semi-gentle squares and terraces westward by Copenhagen Street or, best of all, mounting to the region's canal, where we paused to lean over the bridge and watched flotillas of ducks steer under us, or little white dogs dash impotently furious, from stem to stern of the great lazy barges painted in accrued vehemence of Vermillion and Azure. These were happy hours when the specter of religion ceased to overshadow us for a little while, when my father forgot the apocalypse and dropped his austere phrasology, but when our bass and treble voices used to wring out together over some foolish little jest or some mirthful recollection of his past experiences, little soft oasis these in the hard desert of our sandy spiritual life at home. There was an unbending two when we used to sing together, in my case very tunelessly. I had inherited a plentiful lack of musical genius from my mother, who had neither ear nor voice, and who had said, in the course of her last illness, I shall sing his praise at length in strains I never could master here below. My father, on the other hand, had some knowledge of the principles of vocal music, although not I am afraid much taste. He had at least great fondness for singing hymns, in the manner then popular with the evangelicals, very loudly, and so slowly that I used to count how many words I could read silently between the one syllable of the singing and the other. My lack of skill did not prevent me from being zealous at these vocal exercises, and my father and I used to sing lustily together. The Wowsleys, Charlotte Elliot, just as I am without one plea, and James Montgomery, however, with the Lord, represented his predilection in hymology. I acquiesced, although that would not have been my independent choice. These represented the devotional verse which made its direct appeal to the evangelical mind and served, in those Puseite days, to counteract the high church poetry founded on the Christian year. Of that famous volume I never met with a copy until I was grown up, and equally unknown in our circle were the hymns of Newman, Faber, and Neal. It was my father's planned, from the first, to keep me entirely ignorant of the poetry of the high church which deeply offended his Calvinism. He thought that religious truth could be sucked in like mother's milk from hymns which were godly and sound, and yet correctly versified. I was, therefore, carefully trained in this direction from an early date, but my spirit had rebelled against some of these hymns, especially against those written, a mighty multitude, by Horatius Bonar, noddly refusing to read Bonar's I heard the voice of Jesus Say to my mother in our Pimlico lodgings. A secret hostility to this particular form of effusion was already at the age of seven beginning to define itself in my brain, side by side with an unctus infantile conformity. I find a difficulty in recalling the precise nature of the religious instruction which my father gave me at this time. It was incessant, and it was founded on the close inspection of the Bible, particularly of the epistles of the New Testament. This summer, as my eighth year advanced, we read the Epistle to the Hebrews, with very great deliberation, stopping every moment that my father might expound it, verse by verse. The extraordinary beauty of the language, for instance, the matchless cadences and images of the first chapter, made a certain impression upon my imagination and were, I think, my earliest initiation into the magic of literature. I was incapable of defining what I felt, but I certainly had a grip in the throat, which was, in its essence, a purely aesthetic emotion when my father read in his pure, large, ringing voice such passages as, The heavens are the works of thy hands, they shall perish, but thou remainest, and they all shall wax old as doth the garment, and as a vesture shall thou fold them up, and they shall be changed, but thou art the same, and thy years shall not fail. But the dialectic parts of the Epistle puzzled and confused me, such metaphysical ideas as laying again the foundation of repentance from dead works, and crucifying the Son of God afresh, were not successfully brought down to the level of my understanding. My father's religious teaching to me was almost exclusively doctrinal. He did not observe the value of negative education, that is to say, of leaving nature alone to fill up the gaps which it is her design to deal with at a later and ripe or day. He did not even satisfy himself with those moral injunctions which should form the basis of infantile discipline. He was in a tremendous hurry to push on my spiritual growth, and he fed me with theological meat which it was impossible for me to digest. Some glimmer of a suspicion that he was sailing on the wrong tack must, I should suppose, have broken in upon him when we had reached the eighth and ninth chapters of Hebrews where addressing readers who had been brought up under the Jewish distanciation and had the formalities of the Law of Moses in their very blood, the Apostle battles with their dangerous conservatism. It is a very noble piece of spiritual casualstry, but it is signally unfitted for the comprehension of a child. Suddenly, by my flushing up with anger and saying, oh, how I do hate that Law, my father perceived and paused an amazement to perceive that I took the Law to be a person of malignant temper from whose cruel bondage and from whose intolerable tyranny and unfairness some excellent person was crying out to be delivered. I wished to hit the Law with my fist for being so mean and unreasonable. Upon this, of course, it was necessary to reopen the whole line of exposition. My father, without realizing it, had been talking on his own level, not on mine, and now he condescended to me. But without very great success. The melodious language, the divine forensic audacities, the magnificent ebb and flow of argument which make the epistle to the Hebrews such a miracle were far and away beyond my reach, and they only bewildered me. Some evangelical children of my generation, I understand, were brought up on a work called Line Upon Line, Here a Little and There a Little. My father's ambition would not submit to anything suggested by such a title as that, and he committed, from his own point of view, a fatal mistake when he sought to build spires and battlements without having been at the pains to settle a foundation beneath them. We were not always reading the epistle to the Hebrews, however. Not always was my flesh being made to creep by having it insisted upon that almost all things are by the law purged with blood, and without blood there is no remission of sin. In our lighter moods we turned to the Book of Revelation and chased the phantom of potpourri through feliginous pages. My father, I think, missed my mother's company almost more acutely in his researches into prophecy than in anything else. This had been their unceasing recreation, and no third person could possibly follow the curious path which they had hewn for themselves through this jungle of symbols. But, more and more, my father persuaded himself that I too was initiated, and by degrees I was made to share in all his speculations and interpretations. Hand in hand we investigated the number of the beast, which number is six hundred, three score, and six. Hand in hand we inspected the nations to see whether they had the mark of Babylon in their foreheads. Hand in hand we watched the spirits of devils gathering the kings of the earth into the place which is called in the Hebrew tongue Armageddon. Our unity in these excursions was so delightful that my father was lulled in any suspicion he might have formed that I did not quite understand what it was all about, nor could he have desired a pupil more docile or more ardent than I was in my flaming denunciations of the papacy. If there was one institution more than another which, at this early stage of my history, I loathed and feared, it was what we invariably spoke of as the so-called Church of Rome. In later years I have met with stout protestants gallant down with the Pope men from County Antrim and ladies who see the hand of the Jesuits in every public and private misfortune. It is the habit of a loose and indifferent age to consider this dwindling body of enthusiasts with suspicion and to regard their attitudes towards Rome as a liberal. But my own feeling is that they are all too mild, that their denunciations err on the side of the anodyne. I have no longer the slightest wish myself to denounce the Roman Communion, but if it is to be done I have an idea that the latter-day Protestants do not know how to do it. In Lord Chesterfield's phrase these anti-Pope men don't understand their own silly business. They make concessions and allowances, they put on gloves to touch the accursed thing. Not thus did we approach the scarlet woman in the fifties. We palliated nothing, we believed in no good attentions. We used, I myself used, in my tender innocencey language of the seventeenth century, such as is no longer introduced into any species of controversy. As a little boy when I thought with intense vagueness of the Pope I used to shut my eyes tight and clench my fists. We welcomed any social disorder in any part of Italy as likely to be annoying to the papacy. If there was a custom house officer stabbed in a frockus at Saussary, we gave loud thanks that liberty and light were breaking in upon Sardinia. If there was an unsuccessful attempt to murder the Grand Duke, we lifted up our voices to celebrate the faith and sufferings of the dear persecuted Tuscans, and the record of some apocryphal monstrosity in Naples would only reveal to us a glorious opening for gospel energy. My father celebrated the announcement in the newspapers of a considerable emigration from the papal dominions by rejoicing at this outcrowding of many throughout the harlot's domain for her sins and her plagues. No, the Protestant League may consider itself to be an earnest and active body, but I can never look upon its efforts as anything but lukewarm standing as I do with the light of others' days around me. As a child, whatever I might question, I never doubted the turpitude of Rome. I do not think I had formed any idea whatever of the character or pretensions or practices of the Catholic Church or indeed of what it consisted or its nature, but I regarded it with a vague tear as a wild beast, the only good point about it being that it was very old and was soon to die. When I turned to Jukes or Newton for further detail, I could not understand what they said. Perhaps on the whole there was no disadvantage in that. It is possible that someone may have observed to my father that the conditions of our life were unfavorable to our health, although I hardly think that he would have encouraged any such advice. As I look back upon this faraway time I am surprised at the absence in it of any figures but our own. He and I together, now in that study among the sea anemones and starfishes, now on the canal bridge, looking down at the ducks, now at our hard little meals served up as those of a dreamy widower are likely to be when one made of all work provides them. Now under the lamp at the maps we both love so much, this is what I see. No third presence is ever with us. Whether it occurred to him that such a solitude adieu was excellent in the long run for neither of us or whether any chance visitor or one of the saints who used to see me at the room every Sunday morning suggested that a female influence might put a little rose color into my pasty cheeks, I know not. All I am aware of is that one day towards the close of the summer, as I was gazing into the street, I saw a four-wheeled cab stop outside our door and deposit with several packages a strange lady who was shown up into my father's study and was presently brought down and introduced to me. Miss Marks, as I shall take the liberty of calling this person, was so long a part of my life that I must pause to describe her. She was tall, rather gaunt, with high cheekbones, her teeth were prominent and very white, her eyes were china blue and were always absolutely fixed, wide open on the person she spoke to, her nose was very inclined to be read at the tip. She had a kind, hearty, sharp mode of talking, but did not exercise it much, being on the whole tessiturn. She was bustling and nervous, not particularly refined, not quite, I imagine, what is called a lady. I supposed her, if I thought of the matter at all, to be very old, but perhaps she may have been when we knew her first some forty-five summers. Miss Marks was an orphan, depending upon her work for her living, she would not in these days of examinations have come up to the necessary educational standards, but she had enjoyed experience in teaching and was prepared to be a conscientious and careful governess up to her lights. I was now informed by my father that it was in this capacity that she would in future take her place in our household. I was not informed, what I gradually learned by observation, that she would also act in it as housekeeper. Miss Marks was a somewhat grotesque personage, and might easily be painted as a kind of eccentric Dickens character, a mixture of a Mrs. Pipchin and Miss Sally Brass. I will confess that when, in many years to come, I read Dombie and Son. Certain features of Mrs. Pipchin did irresistibly remind me of my excellent past governess. I can imagine Miss Marks saying, but with a facetious intent, that children who sniffed would not go to heaven. But I was instantly ashamed of the parallel, because my gaunt old friend was a thoroughly good and honest woman, not intelligent and not graceful, but desirous in every way to do her duty. Her duty to me she certainly did, and I am afraid I hardly rewarded her with the devotion she deserved. From the first I was indifferent to her wishes, and as much as was convenient I ignored her existence. She held no power over my attention, and if I accepted her guidance along the path of instruction it was because, odd as it may sound, I really loved knowledge. I accepted her company without objection, and though there were occasional outbreaks of tantrums on both sides, we both got on very well together for several years. I did not, however, at any time surrender my inward will to the wishes of Miss Marks. In the circle of our life the religious element took so preponderatingly a place that it is impossible to avoid mentioning what might otherwise seem unimportant, the theological views of Miss Marks. How my father discovered her, or from what field of educational enterprise he plucked her in her prime, I never knew, but she used to mention that my father's ministrations had opened her eyes from which scales had fallen. She had accepted, on their presentation to her, the entire gamut of his principles. Miss Marks was accustomed, while putting me to bed, to dwell darkly on the incidents of her past, which had, I fear, been an afflicted one. I believe I do her rather limited intelligence, no injury, when I say that it was prepared to swallow at one mouthful whatever my father presented to it. So delighted was its way, warn possessor, to find herself in a comfortable, or at least an independent, position. She soon bowed, if there was indeed any resistance from the first, very contentedly in the house of Rimen, learning to repeat, with marked fluency, the customary formulas, and shabaleths. On my own religious development she had no great influence, any such guttering theological rush-light as Miss Marks might dutifully exhibit faded for me in the blaze of my father's glaring beacon-lamp of faith. Hardly was Miss Marks settled in the family, then my father left us on an expedition about which my curiosity was exercised, but not until later satisfied. He had gone, as we afterwards found, to South Devon, to a point on the coast which he had known of old. Here he had hired a horse, and had ridden about until he saw a spot he liked, where a villa was being built on speculation. Nothing equals the courage of these reckless men. My father got off his horse and tied it to the gate, and then he went in and bought the house on a ninety-nine years lease. I need hardly say that he had made the matter a subject of the most earnest prayer, and had entreated the Lord for guidance. When he felt attracted to this particular villa he did not doubt that he was directed to it in answer to his supplication, and he wasted no time in further balancing or inquiring. On my eighth birthday, with bag and baggage complete, we all made the toilful journey down into Devonshire, and I was a town-child no longer. A new element now entered into my life. A fresh rival arose to compete for me with my father's dogmatic theology. This rival was the sea. When Wordsworth was a little child, the presence of the mountains and the clouds lighted up his spirit with gleams that were like the flashing of a shield. He has described, in the marvelous pages of the Prelude, the impact of nature upon the infant soul. But he has described it vaguely and faintly, with some infirmity of love for days disowned by memory. I think because he was brought up in the midst of spectacular beauty and could name no moment, mark no here or now, when the wonder broke upon him. It was at the age of twice five summers he thought that he began to hold unconscious intercourse with nature, drinking in the pure organic pleasure from the floating mists and winding waters. Perhaps, in his anxiety to be truthful and in the absence of any record, he put the date of his conscious rapture too late rather than too early. Certainly my own impregnation with the obscurely defined but keenly felt loveliness of the open sea dates from the first week of my ninth year. The village, on the outskirts of which we had taken up our abode, was built parallel to the cliff flying above the shore, but half a mile inland. For a long time after the date I have now reached, no other form of natural scenery than the sea had any effect upon me at all. The tours of the distant moor might be drawn in deep blue against the pallor of our morning or our evening sky, but I never looked at them. It was the sea, always the sea, nothing but the sea. From our house, or from the field at the back of our house, or from any part of the village itself, there was no appearance to suggest that there could lie anything in an easterly direction to break the infinitude of red plowed fields. But on that earliest morning, how my heart remembers we hastened, miss marks, the maid, and I between them along a couple of high-walled lanes, when suddenly, far below us, in an immense arc of light, there stretched the enormous plain of waters. We had but to cross a step or two of downs when the hollow sides of the great limestone cove yawned at our feet, descending like a broken cup down, down to the moon of snow-white shingle and the expanse of blue-green sea. In these twentieth-century days, a careful municipality has studded the down with rustic seats that has shut its dangers out with railings, has cut a winding carriage drive round the curves of the cove down to the shore, and has planted sausage laurels at intervals and clearings made for that aesthetic purpose. When last I saw the place, thus smartened and secured, with its hair and curlpapers and its feet in patented leathers, I turned from it in anger and disgust, and could almost have wept. I suppose that to those who knew it in no other guise, it may still have beauty. No parish councils, beneficent and shrewd, can obscure the luster of the waters or compress the vastness of the sky. But what man could do to make wild beauty ineffectual, tame and empty has amply been performed at Ottecom. Very different was it fifty years ago in its uncoothed majesty. No road, save the mirror's goat path, led down its concave wilderness in which loose furs bushes and untrimmed brambles wantoned into the likeness of trees, each draped in audacious tissue of wild gonatus. Through this fantastic maze, the traveler wound his way, led by little other clue than by the instinct of descent. For me, as a child, it meant the labor of a long and endless morning, to descend to the snow-white pebbles, to sport at the edge of the cold, sharp sea, and then to climb up home again, slipping in the sticky red mud, clutching at the smooth boughs of the wild ash, toiling upwards into flat land out of that hollow world of rocks. On the first occasion, I recollect, our cockney housemaid, enthusiastic young creature that she was, flung herself down upon her knees and drank of the salt waters. Miss Marx, more instructed in phenomena, refrained, but I, although I was perfectly aware of what the taste would be, insisted on sipping a few drops from the palm of my hand. This was a slight recurrence of what I have called my natural magic practices, which had passed into the background of my mind, but had not quite disappeared. I recollect that I thought I might secure some power of walking on the sea, if I drag of it, a perfectly irrational movement of mind, like those of savages. My great desire was to walk out over the sea as far as I could, and then lie flat on it, face downwards, and peer into the depths. I was tormented with this ambition, and like many grown-up people, was so fully occupied by these vain and ridiculous desires that I neglected the actual natural pleasures around me. The idea was not quite so demented, as it may seem, because we were in the habit of singing, as well as reading, of those enraptured beings who spend their days in flinging down their golden crowns upon the jasper sea. Why, I argued, should I not be able to fling down my straw hat upon the tides of Oticum? And, without question, a majestic scene upon the lake of Geneseret had also inflamed my fancy. Of all these things, of course, I was careful to speak to no one. It was not with Miss Marks, however, but with my father, that I became accustomed to make the laborious and exquisite journeys down to the sea and back again. His work as a naturalist eventually took him, laden with implements, to the rock pools on the shore, and I was in attendance as an acolyte. But our earliest winter in South Devon was darkened for us both by disappointments, the cause of which lay, at that time, far out of my reach. In the spirit of my father were then running, with furious velocity, two hostile streams of influence. I was standing just now thinking of these things, where the cascine ends in the wooded point which is carved out sharply by the lion-colored swirl of the arno on the one side, and by the pure flow of the mignon on the other. The rivers meet and run parallel, but there comes a moment when the one or the other must conquer, and it is the yellow vehemence that drowns the pure tide. So, through my father's brain, in that year of scientific crisis, 1857, there rushed two kinds of thought, each absorbing, each convincing, yet totally irreconcilable. There is a peculiar agony in the paradox that truth has two forms, each of them indisputable, yet each antagonistic to the other. It was this discovery that there were two theories of physical life, each of which was true, but the truth of each incompatible with the truth of the other, which shook the spirit of my father with perturbation. It was not really a paradox, it was a fallacy if he could only have known it, but he allowed the turbid volume of superstition to drown the delicate stream of reason. He took one step in the service of truth, and then he drew back in an agony and accepted the servitude of error. This was the great moment in the history of thought, when the theory of the mutability of species was preparing to throw a flood of light upon all departments of human speculation and action. It was becoming necessary to stand emphatically in one army or the other. Liao was surrounding himself with disciples who were making strides in the direction of discovery. Darwin had long been collecting facts with regard to the variation of animals and plants. Hooker and Wallace, Asa Gray, and even Agassi, in his own sphere, were coming closer and closer to a perception of that secret, which was first to reveal itself clearly to the patient and humble genius of Darwin. In the year before, in 1856, Darwin, under pressure from Liao, had begun that modest statement of the New Revelation, that abstract of an essay, which developed so mightily into the origin of species. Walliston's variation of species had just appeared and had been a nine days wonder in the wilderness. On the other side, the reactionaries, although never dreaming of the fate which hung over them, had not been idle. In 1857, the astounding question had for the first time been propounded with contumely. What then did we come from an orangutan? The famous vestiges of creation had been supplying a sugar and water panacea for those who could not escape from the trend of evidence and who yet clung to revelation. Owen was encouraging reaction by resisting with all the strength of his prestige, the theory of immutability of species. In this period of intellectual ferment, as when a great political revolution is being planned, many possible adherents were confidentially tested with hints and encouraged to reveal their bias in a whisper. It was the notion of Liao, himself a great mover of men, that before the doctrine of natural selection was given to a world which would be sure to lift up at it a howl of execration, a certain bodyguard of sound and experienced naturalists, expert in the description of species, would be privately made aware of its tenor. Among those who were thus initiated or approached with a view towards possible illumination was my father. He was spoken to by Hooker and later on by Darwin after meetings of the Royal Society in the summer of 1857. My father's attitude towards the theory of natural selection was critical in his career. And oddly enough, it exercised an immense influence on my own experience as a child. Let it be admitted at once, mournful as the admission is, that every instinct in his intelligence went out at first to greet the new light. It had already done so when a recollection of the opening chapter of Genesis checked it at the outset. He consulted with Carpenter, a great investigator, but one who is fully as incapable of himself of remodeling his ideas with regard to the old accepted hypotheses. They both determined on various rounds to have nothing to do with the terrible theory, but to hold steadily to the law of the fixity of species. It was exactly at this juncture that we left London and the slight and occasional, but always extremely salutary, personal intercourse with men of scientific leading, which my father had enjoyed at the British Museum and at the Royal Society, came to an end. His next act was to burn his ships down to the last beam and log out of which a raft could have been made. By a strange act of willfulness, he closed the doors upon himself forever. My father had never admired Sir Charles Lyle, and I think that the infamous Lord Chancellor manner of the geologist intimidated him, and we undervalue the intelligence of those whose conversation puts us at a disadvantage. For Darwin and Hooker, on the other hand, he had a profound esteem, and I know not whether this had anything to do with the fact that he chose, for his impetuous experiment and reaction, the field of geology, rather than that of zoology or botany. Lyle had been threatening to publish a book on the geological history of man, which was to be a bombshell flung into the camp of the catastrophists. My father, after a long reflection, prepared a theory of his own, which, as he fondly hoped, would take the wind out of Lyle's sails and justify geology to godly readers of Genesis. It was very briefly that there had been no gradual modification of the surface of the earth or slow development of organic forms, but that when the catastrophic act of creation took place, the world presented instantly the structural appearance of a planet on which life had long existed. The theory, coarsely enough, and to my father's great indignation, was defined by a hasty press as being this, that God hid the fossils in the rocks in order to tempt geologists into infidelity. In truth, it was the logical and inevitable conclusion of accepting, literally, the doctrine of a sudden act of creation. It emphasized the fact that any breach in the circular course of nature could be conceived only on the supposition that the object created bore false witness to past processes, which had never taken place. For instance, Adam would certainly possess hair and teeth and bones in a condition which it must have taken many years to accomplish, yet he was created full-grown yesterday. He would certainly, though Sir Thomas Brown denied it, display an unfalse, yet no umbilical cord had ever attached him to a mother. Never was a book cast upon the waters with greater anticipations of success than was this curious, this obstinate, this fanatical volume. My father lived in a fever of suspense waiting for the tremendous issue. This umfalus of his, he thought, was to bring all the turmoil of scientific speculation to a close, fling geology into the arms of scripture and make the lion eat grass with the lamb. It was not surprising, he admitted, that there had been experienced an ever-increasing discord between the facts which geology brings to light and the direct statements of the early chapters of Genesis. Nobody was to blame for that. My father, and my father alone, possessed the secret of the enigma. He alone held the key which could smoothly open the lock of geological mystery. He offered it with a glowing gesture to atheists and Christians alike. This to us to be the universal panacea, this the system of intellectual therapeutics which could not but heal all the maladies of the age. But alas, atheists and Christians alike looked at it and laughed and threw it away. In the course of that dismal winter as the post began to bring in private letters, few and chilly, and public reviews, many and scornful, my father looked in vain for the approval of the churches and in vain for the acquiescence of the scientific societies and in vain for the gratitude of those thousands of thinking persons which he had rashly assured himself of receiving. As his reconciliation of scripture statements and geological deductions was welcomed nowhere, as Darwin continued silent and the youthful Huxley was scornful, and even Charles Kingsley, from whom my father had expected the most instant appreciation, wrote that he could not give up the painful and slow conclusion of five and twenty years study of geology and believe that God has written on the rocks one enormous and superfluous lie. As all this happened or failed to happen, a gloom, cold and dismal, descended upon our morning teacups. It was what the poets mean by an inspisated gloom. It thickened day by day as hope and self-confidence evaporated in thin clouds of disappointment. My father was not prepared for such a fate. He had been the spoiled darling of the public, the constant favorite of the press, and now, like the dark angels of old, so huge a rout encumbered him with ruin. He could not recover from amazement at having offended everybody by an enterprise which had been undertaken in the cause of universal reconciliation. During that grim season, my father was no lively companion and circumstance after combined to drive him further from humanity. He missed more than ever the sympathetic ear of my mother. It was present to support him, nothing of that artful female casualty which insinuates into the wounded consciousness of a man, the conviction that, after all, he is right and all the rest of the world is wrong. My father used to tramp in solitude around and around the red plowed field, which was going to be his lawn, or sheltering himself from the thin Devonian rain, pace up and down the still naked veranda where blossoming creepers were to be. And I think that was added to his chagrin with all his fellow mortals, a first tincture of that heresy which was to attack him later on. It was now that, I fancy, he began in his depression to be angry with God. How much devotion had he given? How many sacrifices had he made, only to be left storming around this red morass with no one in all the world to care for him, except one pale-faced child with its cheek pressed to the window. After one or two brilliant excursions to the sea winter, in its dampest, muddiest, most languid form, had fallen upon us and shut us in. It was a dreary winter for the wifeless man and the motherless boy. We had come into the house in precipitant abandonment to that supposed answer to prayer, a great deal too soon. In order to rake together the lump sum for buying it, my father had denuded himself of almost everything and our sticks of chairs and tables filled but two or three rooms. Half the little house, or villa, as we called it, was not papered. Two-thirds were not furnished. The workmen were still finishing the outside when we arrived and in that connection I recall a little incident which exhibits my father's morbid delicacy of conscience. He was accustomed in his brighter moments, and this was before the publication of his own follows, occasionally to sing loud dorseture songs of his early days in a strange, broad, wessex lingo that I loved. One October afternoon, he and I were sitting on the veranda, and my father was singing. Just around the corner, out of sight, two carpenters were putting up the framework of a greenhouse. In a pause, one of them said to his fellow, he can sing a song so well as another, though he be a minister. My father, who was holding my hand loosely, clutched it, and looking up, I saw his eyes darken. He never sang a secular song again during the whole of his life. Later in the year, and after his literary misfortune, his conscience became more troublesome than ever. I think he considered the failure of his attempt at the reconciliation of science with religion to have been intended by God as a punishment for something he had done or left undone. In those brooding tramps around and around the garden, his soul was on its knees, searching the corners of his conscience for some sin of a mission or commission. And one by one, every pleasure, every recreation, every trifle scraped out of the dust of past experience, was magnified into a huge offense. He thought that the smallest evidence of levity, the least unbending to human instinct, might be seized by those around him as evidence of inconsistency and might lead the weaker brethren into offense. The incident of the Carpenters in the comic song is typical of a condition of mind which now possessed my father, in which act after act became taboo, not because each was sinful in itself, but because it might lead others into sin. I have the conviction that Miss Marks was now mightily afraid of my father. Whenever she could, she withdrew to the room she called her boudoir, a small chili apartment sparsely furnished, looking over what was in process of becoming the vegetable garden. Very properly, that she might have some sanctuary, Miss Marks forbade me to enter this virginal bower, which, of course, became to me an object of harrowing curiosity. Through the keyhole I could see practically nothing. One day I contrived to slip inside and discovered that there was nothing to see but a plain bedstead and a toilet table void of all attraction. In this boudoir, on winter afternoons, a fire would be lighted and Miss Marks would withdraw to it, not seen by us anymore between high tea and the apocalyptic exercise known as worship, in less strenuous households much less austenarily practiced under the name of family prayers. Left, meanwhile, to our own devices, my father would mainly be reading his book or paper held close up to the candle, while his lips and heavy eyebrows occasionally quivered and palpitated with literary ardor in a manner strangely exciting to me. Miss Marks, in a very high cap and her large teeth shining, would occasionally appear in the doorway, desiring, with spurious geniality, to know how we were getting on. But on these occasions, neither of us replied to Miss Marks. Sometimes in the course of this winter, my father and I had long, cozy talks together over the fire. Our favorite subject was murders. I wonder whether little boys of eight, soon to go upstairs alone at night, often discuss violent crime with a widow or a papa. The practice I cannot help thinking is unusual. It was, however, consecutive with us. We tried other secular subjects, but we were sure to come round at last to what do you suppose they really did with the body. I was told, a thrilled listener, the adventure of Mrs. Manning, who killed a gentleman on the stairs and buried him in quick lime in the back kitchen. And it was at this time that I learned the useful historical fact, which abides with me after half a century, that Mrs. Manning was hanged in black satin, which thereupon went wholly out of fashion in England. I also heard about Burke and Hare, whose story nearly froze me into stone with horror. These were crimes which appear in the Chronicles. But who will tell me what the carpet bag mystery was, which my father and I discussed evening after evening? I have never come across a whisper of it since, and I suspected of having been a hoax. As I recall the details, people in a boat passing down the Thames saw a carpet bag hung high in air on one of the projections of a pier of Waterloo Bridge, being with difficulty dragged down, or perhaps up. This bag was found to be full of human remains, dreadful butchers' business of joints and fragments. Persons were missed, were identified, were again denied, the holes of vapor in my memory which shifts as I try to define it. But clear enough is the picture I hold of myself in a high chair on the left hand side of the city room fireplace, the leaping flames reflected in the glass case of tropical insects on the opposite wall, and my father leaning anxiously forward with uplifted finger, emphasizing to me the prose and cons of the horrible carpet bag evidence. I suppose that my interest in these discussions, in heaven knows I was animated enough, amused and distracted my father, whose idea of a suitable theme for childhood's ear now seems to me surprising. I soon found that these subjects were not welcome to everybody for starting the carpet bag mystery one morning with Ms. Marks in the hope of delaying my arithmetic lesson. She fairly threw her apron over her ears and told me, from that vantage, that if I did not desist at once she would scream. Occasionally we took winter walks together, my father and I, down some lane that led to a sight of the sea or over the rolling downs. We tried to recapture the charm of those delightful strolls in London where we used to lean over the bridges and watch the ducks. But we could not recover this pleasure. My father was deeply enwoven in the chain of his own thoughts and would stalk on, without a word, buried in angry reverie. If he spoke to me on these occasions it was a pain to me to answer him. I could talk on easy terms with him indoors seated in my high chair with our heads on a level, but it was intolerably laborious to look up into the firmament and converse with a dark face against the sky. The actual exercise of walking too was very exhausting to me. The bright red mud to the strange color of which I could not for a long while get accustomed, becoming caked about my little shoes and wearying me extremely. I would grow petulant and cross, contradict my father and pose as whims. These walks were distressing to us both, yet he did not like to walk alone and he had no other friend. However, as the winter advanced they had to be abandoned, and the habit of our taking a constitutional together was never resumed. I look back upon myself at this time as upon a contankerous, ill-tempered and unobliging child. The only excuse I can offer is that I really was not well. The change to Devonshire had not suited me. My health gave the excellent Miss Mark some anxiety, but she was not ready in resource. The dampness of the house was terrible. Indoors and out the atmosphere seemed soaked in chilly vapors. Under my bed clothes at night I shook like a jelly, unable to sleep for cold, though I was heaped with coverings, while my skin was all puckered with goose flesh. I could eat nothing solid without suffering immediately from violent hiccup, so that much of my time was spent lying prone on my back upon the earth rug, awakening the echoes like a cuckoo. Miss Mark's, therefore, cut off all food but milk-soap, a loathly bowl of which appeared at every meal. In consequence, the hiccup lessened, but my strength declined with it. I languished in a perpetual Qatar. I was roused to a consciousness that I was not considered well, by the fact that my father prayed publicly at morning and evening worship that if it was the Lord's will to take me to himself there might be no doubt whatever about my being a sealed child of God and an inheritor of glory. I was partly disconcerted by, partly vain of, this open advertisement of my ailments. Of our dealings with the saints, a fresh assortment of whom met us on our arrival in Devonshire, I shall speak presently. My father's austerity of behavior was, I think, perpetually accentuated by his fear of doing anything to offend the consciences of these persons whom he supposed no doubt to be more sensitive than they really were. He was fond of saying that a very little stain upon the conscience makes a wide breach in our communion with God. And he counted possible errors of conduct by hundreds and by thousands. It was in this winter that his attention was particularly drawn to the festival of Christmas, which, apparently, he had scarcely noticed in London. On the subject of all feasts of the Church, he held views of an almost protest peculiarity. He looked upon each of them as nuggetory and worthless, but the keeping of Christmas appeared to him by far the most hateful and nothing less than an act of idolatry. The very word is popish, he used to exclaim, Christ's mass, pursing up his lips with the gesture of one who tastes as affidavit by accident. Then he would adduce the antiquity of the so-called feast, adapted from horrible heathen rites, in itself a soiled relic of the abominable yule tide. He would denounce the horrors of Christmas until it almost made me blush to look at a hollyberry. On Christmas Day of this year, 1857, our villa saw a very unusual sight. My father had given strict discharge that no difference whatever was to be made in our meals on that day, that dinner was to be neither more copious than usual nor less so. He was obeyed, but the servants, secretly rebellious, made a small plum pudding for themselves. I discovered afterwards, with pain, that Miss Marks received a slice of it in her boudoir. Early in the afternoon, the maids, of whom we were now advanced keeping to, kindly remarked that the poor dear child ought to have a bit anyhow, and wheedled me into the kitchen where I ate a slice of plum pudding. Shortly I began to feel that pain inside, which in my frail state was inevitable, and my conscience smote me violently. At length, I could bear my spiritual anguish no longer, and bursting into the study I called out, Oh, Papa, Papa, I have eaten the flesh offered to idols. It took some time between my sobs to explain what had happened. Then my father sternly said, Where is the accursed thing? I explained that as much as was left of it was still on the kitchen table. He took me by the hand, and ran with me into the midst of the startled servants, seized what remained of the pudding, and with the plate in one hand, and me still tight in the other, ran until we reached the dust heap, where he flung the idolatrous confectionary onto the middle of the ashes, and then raked it deep down into the mass. The suddenness, the violence, the velocity of this extraordinary act, made an impression on my memory which nothing will ever efface. The key is lost by which I might unlock the perverse malady from which my father's conscience seemed to suffer during the whole of this melancholy winter. But I think that a dislocation of his intellectual system had a great deal to do with it. Up to this point in his career, he had, as we have seen, nourished the delusion that science and revelation could be mutually justified, that some sort of compromise was possible. With great and ever greater distinctness, his investigations had shown him that in all departments of organic nature, there are visible the evidences of slow modification of forms of the type developed by the pressure and practice of eons. This conviction had been borne in upon him until it was positively irresistible. Where was his place then, as a sincere and accurate observer? Manifestly, it was with the pioneers of the new truth. It was with Darwin, Wallace, and Hooker. But did not the second chapter of Genesis say that in six days the heavens and earth were finished and the host of them, and that on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made? Here was a dilemma. Geology certainly seemed to be true, but the Bible, which was God's word, was true. If the Bible said that all things in heaven and earth were created in six days, created in six days they were, in six literal days of 24 hours each. The evidences of spontaneous variation of form, acting over an immense space of time upon ever modifying organic structures seemed overwhelming, but they must either be brought into line with the six-day labor of creation or they must be rejected. I have already shown how my father worked out the ingenious unfalice theory in order to justify himself as a strictly scientific observer who was also a humble slave of revelation. But the old convention and the new rebellion would alike have none of his compromise. To a mind so acute and at the same time so narrow as that of my father, a mind which is all logical and positive without breath, without suppleness and without imagination, to be subjected to a check of this kind is agony. It has not the relief of a smaller nature, which escapes from the dilemma by some foggy formula, nor the resolution of a larger nature to take to its wings and surmount the obstacle. My father, although half suffocated by the emotion of being lifted, as it were, on the great biological wave, never dreamed of letting go his clutch of the ancient tradition, but hung there, strained and buffeted. It is extraordinary that he, an honest husband of science, as Huxley once called him, should not have been content to allow others whose horizons were wider than his could be to pursue those purely intellectual surveys for which he had no species of aptitude. As a collector of facts and marshaler of observations, he had not a rival in that age. His very absence of imagination aided him in this work, but he was more an attorney than philosopher and he lacked that sublime humility, which is the crown of genius. For this obstinate persuasion that he alone knew the mind of God, that he alone could interpret the designs of the creator, what did it result from if not from a congenital lack of that highest modesty which replies, I do not know, even to the questions which faith with menacing forger insists on having most positively answered. Chapter 6 of Father and Son This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Eugene Smith. Father and Son by Edmund Goss. Chapter 6 During the first year of our life in Devonshire, the ninth year of my age, my father's existence, and therefore mine, was almost entirely divided between attending to the little community of saints in the village and collecting, examining and describing marine creatures from the seashore. In the course of these 12 months, we had scarcely any social distractions of any kind, and I never once crossed the bounds of the parish. After the worst of the winter was over, my father recovered much of his spirits and his power of work, and the earliest sunshine soothed and refreshed us both. I was still almost always with him, but we had now some curious companions. The village at the southern end of which our village stood was not pretty. It had no rural picturesqueness of any kind. The only pleasant feature of it, the handsome and ancient parish church with its umbrageous church yard, was then almost entirely concealed by a Congress of Mean Shops, which were ultimately, before the close of my childhood, removed. The village consisted of two parallel lines of contiguous houses, all whitewashed and most of them fronted by a trifling shop window. For half a mile, the street ascended at the church, and then descended for another half mile, ending suddenly in fields, the hedges of which displayed at intervals the inevitable Pollard Elm Tree. The walk through the village, which we seemed to make incessantly, was very weary-some to me. I dreaded the rudeness of the children, and there was nothing in the shops to amuse me. Walking on the inch or two of broken pavement in front of the houses was disagreeable and tiresome. In the odor which we breathed on close days from the open doors and windows made me feel faint. But this walk was obligatory, since the public room, as our little chapel was called, lay at the farther extremity of the dreary street. We attended this place of worship immediately on our arrival, and my father, uninvited but unresisted, immediately assumed the administration of it. It was a square, empty room, built, for I know not what purpose, over a stable. Ammoniac odors used to rise through the floor as we sat there in our long derosions. Before our coming, a little flock of persons met in the room, a community of the indefinite sort just becoming frequent in the west of England, pious rustics connected with no other recognized body of Christians, and depending directly on the independent study of the Bible. They were largely women, but there was more than a sprinkling of men, poor, simple, and generally sickly. In later days, under my father's administration, the body increased and positively flourished. It came to include retired professional men, an admiral, nay, even the brother of a peer. But in those earliest years, the brethren and sisters were all of them ordinary peasants. They were jobbing gardeners and journeymen carpenters, masons and tailors, washerwomen and domestic servants. I wish that I could paint in color so vivid that my readers could perceive what their little society consisted of, this quaint collection of humble, conscientious, ignorant and gentle persons. In chronicle or fiction, I have never been fortunate enough to meet with anything which resembled them. The caricatures of enmity and worldly scorn are as crude to my memory as the unction of religious conventionality is featureless. The origin of the meeting had been odd. A few years before we came, a crew of Cornish fishermen, quite unknown to the villagers, were driven by stress of weather into the haven under the cliff. They landed, and instead of going to a public house, they looked about for a room where they could hold a prayer meeting. They were devout Wesleyans, they had come from the open sea, they were far from home, and they had been starved by lack of their customary religious privileges. As they stood about in the street before their meeting, they challenged the respectable girls who came out to stare at them with the question, do you love the Lord Jesus, my maid? Receiving dubious answers, they pressed the inhabitants to come in and pray with them, which several did. Anne Burmington, who long afterwards told me about it, was one of those girls, and she repeated that the fishermen said, what a dreadful thing it will be at the last day when the Lord says, come ye, bless it, and says it not to you, and then depart ye, cursed, and you maidens have to depart. They were finally built young men, with black beards and shining eyes, and I do not question that some flash of sex unconsciously mingled with the curious episode, although their behavior was in all respects discreet. It was perhaps not wholly a coincidence that almost all these particular girls remained unmarried to the end of their lives. After two or three days, the fishermen went off to sea again. They prayed and sailed away, and the girls, who would not even ask their names, never heard of them again. But several of the young women were definitely converted, and they formed the nucleus of our little gathering. My father preached standing at a desk, or celebrated the communion in front of a deal table, where the white napkins spread over it. Sometimes the audience was so small, generally so unexhilarating, that he was discouraged, but he never flagged in energy and zeal. Only those who had given evidence of intelligent acceptance of the theory of simple faith in their atonement through the blood of Jesus were admitted to the communion, or, as it was called, the breaking of bread. It was made a very strong point that no one should break bread unless for good reason chone, until he or she had been baptized, that is to say, totally immersed in solemn conclave by the ministering brother. This rite used in our early days to be performed with picturesque simplicity in the sea on the Otacum Beach. But to this there were, even in those quiet years, extreme objections. A jeering crowd could scarcely be avoided, and women in particular shrank from the ordeal. This used to be a practical difficulty, and my father, when communicants confessed that they had not yet been baptized, would shake his head and say gravely, ah, ah, you shun the cross of Christ. But that baptism in the sea on the open beach was a cross he would not deny. And when we built our own little chapel, a sort of font, planked over, was arranged in the room itself. Among these quiet, taciturn people, there were several whom I recall with affection. In this remote corner of Devonshire, on the road no wither, they had preserved much of the air of that 18th century, which the elders among them perfectly remembered. There was one old man, born before the French Revolution, whose figure often recursed to me. This was James Petherbridge, the nester of our meeting, extremely tall and attenuated. He came on Sundays in a full, white smock frock, smartly embroidered down the front, and when he settled himself to listen, he would raise this smock like a skirt and reveal a pair of immensely long, thin legs, cased in tight leggings and ending in shoes with buckles. As the sacred message fell from my father's lips, the lantern jaws of Mr. Petherbridge slowly fell apart, while his knees sloped to so immense a distance from one another that it seemed as though they could never meet again. He had been pious all his life, and he would tell us in some modest pride that when he was a lad, the farmer's wife, who was his mistress, used to say, I think our gem is going to be a methodology. He'd do so hanker after godly discoursings. Mr. Petherbridge was accustomed to pray orally at our prayer meetings in a funny old voice like wind in a hollow tree, and he seldom failed to express a hope that the Lord would support Miss LaFroy, who was the village schoolmistress and one of our congregation, in her labor of teaching the young idea how to shoot. I, not understanding this literary illusion, long believed the school to be addicted to some species of pistol practice. The key of the room was kept by Richard Moxhay, the mason, who was of a generation younger than Mr. Petherbridge, but yet getting on in years. Moxhay, I cannot tell why, was always dressed in white corduroy on which any stain of Devonshire scarlet mud was painfully conspicuous. When he was smartened up, his appearance suggested that somebody had given him a coating of that rich western whitewash which looks like Devonshire cream. His locks were long and sparse and as deadly black as his clothes were white. He was a modest, gentle man, with a wife even more meek and gracious than himself. They never, to my recollection, spoke, unless they were spoken to, and their melancholy and passiveness used to vex my father, who once, referring to the Moxhays, described them, sententiously, but justly, as being laborious, but it would be an exaggeration to say happy Christians. Indeed, my memory pictures almost all the saints of that early time, as sad and humble souls, lacking vitality, yet not complaining of anything definite. A quite surprising number of them, it is true, male and female, suffered from different forms of consumption, so that the room rang in winter evenings with a discord of hacking coughs. But it seems to me that when I was quite young, half the inhabitants of our rural district were affected by tices. No doubt, our peculiar religious community was more likely to attract the feeble members of a population than to tempt the flush and the fair. Miss Marks, patient pilgrim that she was, accepted this quaint society without a murmur, although I do not think it was much to her taste. But in a very short time, it was sweetened to her by the formation of a devoted and romantic friendship for one of the sisters, who was, indeed, if my childish recollection does not fail me, a very charming person. The consequence of this enthusiastic alliance was that I was carried into the bosom of a family to which Miss Marks' new friend belonged, and of these excellent people, I must give what picture I can. Almost opposite the room, therefore at the far end of the village, across one of the rare small gardens in which this first winter I discovered with rapture the magenta stars of a new flower, Hepatica, a shop window displayed a thin row of plates and dishes, cups, and saucers. Above it was painted the name of Burmington. This china shop was the property of three orphan sisters, Anne, Mary Grace, and Bess, the latter, lately married to a carpenter who was elder at our meeting. The other two, resolute old maids. Anne, whom I have already mentioned, had been one of the girls converted by the Cornish fishermen. She was about ten years older than Bess, and Mary Grace came halfway between them. Anne was a very worthy woman, but masterful and passionate, suffering from an ungovernable temper, which at calmer moments she used to refer to, not without complacency, as the sin which death most easily beset me. Bess was insignificant and vulgarized by domestic cares. But Mary Grace was a delightful creature. The Burmingtons lived in what was almost the only old house surviving in the village. It was an extraordinary construction of two stories with vast rooms and winding passages and surprising changes of level. The sisters were poor but very industrious and never in anything like want. They sold, as I have said, crockery, and they took in washing and did a little fine needlework and sold the produce of a great vague garden at the back. In the process of time, the elder sisters took a young woman, whose name was Drusilla Elliott, to live with them as servant and companion. She was a converted person, worshiping with a kindred sect, the Bible Christians. I remember being much interested in hearing how Bess, before her marriage, became converted. Mary Grace, on account of her infirm health, slept alone in one room. In another, a vast size, stood a family fore poster where Anne slept with Drusilla Elliott, and another bed in the same room took Bess. The sisters and their friend had been constantly praying that Bess might find peace, for she was still a stranger to salvation. One night, she suddenly called out, rather crossily, what are you two whispering about? Do go to sleep, to which Anne replied, we are praying for you. How do you know, answered Bess, that I don't believe? And then she told them that that very night, when she was sitting in the shop, she had closed with God's offer of redemption. Late in the night, as it was, Anne and Dusilla could do no less than go in and wake and marry Grace, whom, however, they found awake, praying. She too, for the conversion of Bess. They told her the good news, and all four, kneeling in the darkness, gave thanks aloud to God for his infinite mercy. It was Mary Grace Burmington, who now became the romantic friend of Miss Marks, and a sort of second benevolence to me. She must have been under 30 years of age. She was very small, and she was distressingly deformed in the spine, but she had an animated, almost a sparkling countenance. When we first arrived in the village, Mary Grace was only just recovering from a gastric fever, which had taken her close to the grave. I remember hearing that the vicar, a stout and pompous man, at whom we always glared defiance, went, in Mary Grace's supposed extremity, to the Burmington shop door and shouted, Peace be to this house, intending to offer his ministrations. But that Anne, who was in one of her tantrums, positively hounded him from the doorstep and down the garden in her passionate non-conformity. Mary Grace, however, recovered and soon became, not merely Miss Mark's inseparable friend, but my father's spiritual fact totem. He found it irksome to visit the saints from house to house, and Mary Grace Burmington gladly assumed this labor. She proved a most efficient co-agitor, searched out, cherished, and confirmed any of those, especially the young, who were attracted by my father's preaching, and for several years was a great joy and comfort to us all. Even when her illness so increased that she could no longer rise from her bed, she was a center of usefulness and cheerfulness from that retreat, where she received, in a kind of rustic state, under a patchwork cover lid that was like a basket of flowers. My father, ever reflecting on what could be done to confirm my spiritual vocation, to pin me down, as it were, beyond any possibility of escape, be thought him that it would accustom me to what he called pastoral work in the Lord's service, if I accompanied Mary Grace on her visits from house to house. If it is remembered that I was only eight and a half when this scheme was carried into practice, it will surprise no one to hear that it was not crowned with success. I disliked extremely this visitation of the poor. I felt shy. I had nothing to say. With difficulty could I understand their soft Devonian patois. And most of all, a signal perhaps of my neurotic condition, I dreaded and loathed the smells of their cottages. One had to run over the whole gamut of odors, some so faint that they embraced the nostril with a fairy kiss, others bluntly gross of they knock you down order, some sweet with a dreadful sourness, some bitter with a smack of rancid hair oil. There were fine manly smells of the pigsty in the open drain, and these prided themselves on being all they seem to be. But there were also feminine odors, masperading as you know not what, in which penny whiffs, vials of balm and apaponics seemed to have become tainted vaguely with the residue of the slop pale. It was not, I think, that the villages were particularly dirty, but those were days before the invention of sanitary science, and my poor young nose was morbidly, nay ridiculously sensitive. I often came home from visiting the saints, absolutely incapable of eating the milk sop, with brown sugar strewn over it, which was my evening meal. There was one exception to my unwillingness to join in the pastoral labors of Mary Grace. When she announced, on a fine afternoon, that we were going to Pavor and Barton, I was always agog to start. These were two hamlets in our parish, and, I should suppose, the original home of its population. Pavor was, even then, decayed almost to extinction, but Barton preserved its desultory street of ancient detached cottages. Each, however poor, had a wild garden around it, and where the inhabitants possessed some pride in their surroundings, the roses and the jasmines, and that distinguished creeper, which one sees nowhere at its best, but in Devonshire Cottage Gardens, the stately Cotoniaster, made the whole place a bower. Barton was in vivid contrast to our own harsh, open, squalid village, with its mean, modern houses, its absence of all vegetation. The ancient, thatched cottages of Barton were shut in by moist fills and canopied by ancient trees. They were approached along a deep lane, which was all a wonder and a revelation to me that spring, since, in the very words of Shelley, there in the warm hedge grew lush egglentine, green cowbind in the moonlight-colored may, and cherry blossoms in white cups, whose wine was the bright dew, yet drain not by the day, and wild roses and ivy serpentine with its dark buds and leaves, wandering astray, around and beyond Barton there lay fairyland, all was mysterious, unexplored, rich with infinite possibilities. I should one day enter it, the sword of make-believe in my hand, the cap of courage on my head, when you are a big boy, said the oracle of Mary Grace. For the present we had to contend ourselves with being an unadventurous couple, a little woman, bent half double, and a preter naturally sedate small boy, as we walked very slowly, side by side, conversing on terms of high familiarity in which biblical and colloquial phrases were quaintly jumbled through the sticky red mud of the Pavar lanes with Barton as a born before us. When we came home, my father would sometimes ask me for particulars. Where had we been? Whom had we found at home? What testimony had those visited been able to give of the Lord's goodness to them? What had Mary Grace replied in the way of exhortation, reproof, or condolence? These questions I hated at the time, but they were very useful to me since they gave me the habit of concentrating my attention on what was going on in the course of our visits, in case I might be called upon to give a report. My father was very kind in the manner. He cultivated my powers of expression. He did not snub me when I failed to be intelligent. But I overheard Miss Marks and Mary Grace discussing the whole question under the guise of referring to, you know whom, not a hundred miles hence, fancing that I could not recognize their little ostrich because its head was in a bag of metaphor. I understood perfectly and gathered that they both of them thought this business of my going into undrained cottages injudicious. Accordingly, I was by degrees taken visiting only when Mary Grace was going into the country hamlets, and then I was usually left outside to skip among the flowers and stalk the butterflies. I must not however underestimate the very prominent part taken all through this spring and summer of 1858 by the collection of specimens on the seashore. My father had returned the chagrin of his failure in theorizing now being mitigated to what was his real work in life, the practical study of animal forms in detail. He was not a biologist in the true sense of the term. That luminous indication which Flaubert gives of what the action of the scientific mind should be, a franchisant esprit épaisant le monde sans en, sans pur, sans petit, sans amour, et sans year was opposed in every segment to the attitude of my father, who nevertheless was a man of a very high scientific attainment. But again, I repeat, he was not a philosopher. He was incapable by temperament and education of forming broad generalizations and of escaping in a vast survey from the troublesome pettiness of detail. He saw everything through a lens, nothing in the immensity of nature. Certain senses were absent in him. I think that with all his justice, he had no conception of the importance of liberty. With all his intelligence, the boundaries of the atmosphere in which his mind could think at all were always close about him. With all his faith in the Word of God, he had no confidence in the divine benevolence. And with all his passionate piety, he habitually mistook fear for love. It was down on the shore, trapping along the pebble terraces of the beach, clamoring over the great blocks of fallen clungglomerate, which broke the white curve with rufous promontories that jutted into the sea, or finally bending over those shallow tidal pools in the limestone rocks, which were our proper hunting ground. It was in such circumstances as these that my father became most easy, most happy, most human. That hard look across his brows, which it wearied me to see, the look that came from sleepless anxiety of conscience, faded away, and left the dark countenance still always stern indeed, but serene and un-up-braiding. Those pools were our mirrors, in which, reflected in the dark hyaline, and framed by the sleek and shining fronds of oreweed, are used to appear the shapes of a middle-aged man and a funny little boy, equally eager, and, I almost find the presumption to say, equally well-prepared for business. If anyone goes down to those shores now, if man or boy seeks to follow in our traces, let him realize at once, before he takes the trouble to roll up his sleeves, that his zeal will end in labor lost. There is nothing now, where in our days there was so much. Then the rocks between tide and tide were submarine gardens of a beauty that seemed often to be fabulous, and was positively delusive since, if we delicately lifted the weed curtains of a windless pool, though we might for a moment see its sides and floor pavement with living blossoms, ivory white, rosy red, grange, and amethyst. Yet all that panoply would melt away, furrowed into the hollow rock, if we so much as dropped the pebble in to disturb the magic dream. Half a century ago, in many parts of the coast of Devonshire and Cornwall, where the limestone at the water's edge is rotted to crevices and hollows, the tide line was, like Keats's recent days, a still-unravished bride of quietness. These cups and basins were always full, whether the tide was high or low, and the only way in which they were affected was that twice in the 24 hours they were replenished by cold streams from the Great Sea, and then twice were left brimming to be vivified by the temperate movement of the upper air. They were living flower beds, so exquisite in their perfection that my father, in spite of his scientific requirements, used not seldom to pause before he began to rifle them, ejaculating that it was indeed a pity to disturb such congregated beauty. The antiquity of these rock pools and the infinite succession of the soft and radiant forms, sea anemones, seaweeds, shells, fishes, which had inhabited them, undisturbed since the creation of the world, used to occupy my father's fancy. We burst in, he used to say, where no one had ever thought of intruding before, and if the Garden of Eden had been situate in Devonshire, Adam and Eve, stepping lightly down to bathe in the rainbow-colored spray, would have seen the identical sights that we now saw, the great prawns, lighting-like transparent launches, Anthea waving in the twilight its thick white wax and tentacles, and the fronds of the duke, faintly streaming on the water like huge red banners in some reverted atmosphere. All this is long over and done with. The ring of living beauty drawn about our shores was a very thin and fragile one. It had existed all those centuries solely in consequence of the indifference, the blissful ignorance of man. These rock basins, fringed by coralines, filled with still water almost as pollucid as the upper air itself, thronged with beautiful sensitive forms of life, they exist no longer. They are all profaned and emptied and vulgarized. An army of collectors has passed over them and ravaged every corner of them. The fairy paradise has been violated. The exquisite product of centuries of natural selection has been crushed under the rough paw of well-meaning, idle-minded curiosity. That my father, himself so reverent, so conservative, had by the popularity of his books acquired the direct responsibility for a calamity that he had never anticipated, became clear enough to himself, before many years had passed, and cost him great chagrin. No one will see again on the shore of England what I saw in my early childhood. The submarine vision of dark rocks speckled and starred with an infinite variety of color and streamed over by silken flags of royal crimson and purple. In reviving these impressions, I am unable to give any exact chronological sequence to them. These particular adventures began early in 1858. They reached their greatest intensity in the summer of 1859, and they did not altogether cease so far as my father was concerned until nearly 20 years later. But it was while he was composing what, as I am told by scientific men of today, continues to be his most valuable contribution to knowledge, his history of the British sea and eminence and corals, that we worked together on the shore for a definite purpose. And the last installment of that still classic volume was ready for press by the close of 1859. The way in which my father worked, in his most desperate escapades, was to wade breast high into one of the huge pools and examine the worm-eaten surface of the rock above and below the brim. In such remote places, spots where I could never venture being left, slightly timorous and drameda, chained to a safer level of the cliff. In these extreme basins, they're used often to lurk a marvelous profusion of animal and vegetable forms. My father would search for the roughest and most corroded points of rock, those offering the best refuge for a variety of creatures, and with them chisel off fragments as low down in the water as he could. These pieces of rock were instantly plunged into saltwater of jars, which he had brought with us for the purpose. When, as much had been collected as we could carry away, my father always dragged about an immense square basket, the creak of whose handles I can still fancy that I hear, we turned to trudge up the long climb home. Then, all our prizes were spread out, face upward in shallow pans of clean seawater. In a few hours, when all dirt had subsided and what living creatures we had brought seemed to have recovered their composure, my work began. My eyes were extremely keen and powerful, though they were vexatiously near-sighted. Of no use in examining objects at any distance, in investigating a minute surface, my vision was trained to be invaluable. The shallow pan, with our spoils, would rest on a table near the window, and I, kneeling on a chair opposite the light, would lean over the surface until everything was within an inch or two of my eyes. Often I bent, in my zeal, so far forward that the water touched the tip of my nose and gave me a little icy shock. In this attitude, an idle spectator might have formed the impression that I was trying to wash my head and could not quite summon up a resolution enough to plunge. In this odd pose, I would remain for a long time, holding my breath and examining with extreme care every atom of rock, every swirl of detritus. This was a task which my father could only perform by the help of a lens, with which, of course, he took care to supplement my examination. But that my survey was of use, he has himself most handsomely testified in his actinologia Britannica, where he expresses his debt to the keen and well-practiced eye of my little son. Nor, if boasting is not to be excluded, is it every eminence biologist, every proud and masterful FRS, who can lay his hand on his heart and swear that, before reaching the age of ten years, he had added not merely a new species, but a new genus to the British fauna. That, however, the author of these pages can do. Who, on 29 June 1859, discovered a tiny atom and ran in the greatest agitation to announce the discovery of that object as a form with which he was unequated, which figures since then on all list of sea anemones as Felia murosincta, or the walled corklet. Alas, that so fair a swallow should have made no biological summer in afterlife. These delicious agitations, by the edge of the salt sea wave, must have greatly improved my health, which, however, was still looked upon as fragile. I was loaded with coats and comforters and strolled out between Miss Marks and Mary Grace Birmingham, a muffled ball of flannel. This alone was enough to give me a look of delicacy which the saints, in their blunt way, made no scruple of commenting upon to my face. I was greatly impressed by a conversation held over my bed one evening by the servants. Our cook, Susan, a person of enormous size, and Kate, the tattling tiresome parlor maid who waited upon us. On the summer evening I speak of, we're standing, I cannot tell why, on each side of my bed. I shut my eyes and lay quite still in order to escape conversing with them, and they spoke to one another. Oh, poor lamb, Kate said trivially, he's not long for this world. Going home to Jesus he is, in a jiffy, I should say, by the look of him. But Susan answered, not so. I dreamed about him, and I know for sure that he is to be spared for missionary service. Yes, Susan went on with solemn emphasis. He'll bleed for his Lord in heathen parts. That's what the future have in store for him. When they were gone, I beat upon the cover lid with my fists, and I determined that whatever happened I would not, not, not go out to preach the gospel among horrid, tropical nears. End of chapter 6