Father and Son | Page 9

because he
would so far forget himself as to chase, and even, if it will be credited,
to tickle me. My uncles, who remained bachelors to the end of their
lives, earned a comfortable living; E. by teaching, A. as 'something in
the City', and they rented an old rambling house in Clapton, that same
in which I saw the greyhound. Their house had a strange, delicious
smell, so unlike anything I smelt anywhere else, that it used to fill my
eyes with tears of mysterious pleasure. I know now that this was the
odour of cigars, tobacco being a species of incense tabooed at home on
the highest religious grounds.
It has been recorded that I was slow in learning to speak. I used to be
told that having met all invitations to repeat such words as 'Papa' and
'Mamma' with gravity and indifference, I one day drew towards me a

volume, and said 'book' with startling distinctness. I was not at all
precocious, but at a rather early age, I think towards the beginning of
my fourth year, I learned to read. I cannot recollect a time when a
printed page of English was closed to me. But perhaps earlier still my
Mother used to repeat to me a poem which I have always taken for
granted that she had herself composed, a poem which had a romantic
place in my early mental history. It ran thus, I think:
O pretty Moon, you shine so bright! I'll go to bid Mamma good-night,
And then I'll lie upon my bed And watch you move above my head.
Ah! there, a cloud has hidden you! But I can see your light shine thro';
It tries to hide you--quite in vain, For--there you quickly come again!
It's God, I know, that makes you shine Upon this little bed of mine; But
I shall all about you know When I can read and older grow.
Long, long after the last line had become an anachronism, I used to
shout this poem from my bed before I went to sleep, whether the night
happened to be moonlit or no.
It must have been my Father who taught me my letters. To my Mother,
as I have said, it was distasteful to teach, though she was so prompt and
skillful to learn. My Father, on the contrary, taught cheerfully, by fits
and starts. In particular, he had a scheme for rationalizing geography,
which I think was admirable. I was to climb upon a chair, while,
standing at my side, with a pencil and a sheet of paper, he was to draw
a chart of the markings on the carpet. Then, when I understood the
system, another chart on a smaller scale of the furniture in the room,
then of a floor of the house, then of the back-garden, then of a section
of the street. The result of this was that geography came to me of itself,
as a perfectly natural miniature arrangement of objects, and to this day
has always been the science which gives me least difficulty. My father
also taught me the simple rules of arithmetic, a little natural history,
and the elements of drawing; and he laboured long and unsuccessfully
to make me learn by heart hymns, psalms and chapters of Scripture, in
which I always failed ignominiously and with tears. This puzzled and
vexed him, for he himself had an extremely retentive textual memory.

He could not help thinking that I was naughty, and would not learn the
chapters, until at last he gave up the effort. All this sketch of an
education began, I believe, in my fourth year, and was not advanced or
modified during the rest of my Mother's life.
Meanwhile, capable as I was of reading, I found my greatest pleasure in
the pages of books. The range of these was limited, for story-books of
every description were sternly excluded. No fiction of any kind,
religious or secular, was admitted into the house. In this it was to my
Mother, not to my Father, that the prohibition was due. She had a
remarkable, I confess to me still somewhat unaccountable impression
that to 'tell a story', that is, to compose fictitious narrative of any kind,
was a sin. She carried this conviction to extreme lengths. My Father, in
later years, gave me some interesting examples of her firmness. As a
young man in America, he had been deeply impressed by 'Salathiel', a
pious prose romance by that then popular writer, the Rev. George Croly.
When he first met my Mother, he recommended it to her, but she would
not consent to open it. Nor would she read the chivalrous tales in verse
of Sir Walter Scott, obstinately alleging that they were not 'true'. She
would read none