great alarm lest one of them should fall to the ground. She used to say it was painful to see the poor man's agony of fear. While this was going on the storm grew much worse, so that the people on board were afraid that the ship would be driven from her anchorage. At last the tree fell under the tiny man's hatchet, and nothing was left on the table but the chafing-dish. The conjuror gave back the apron, and then, turning to the captain, said, "Never from this night will I do what I have done tonight. You may believe me or not, but if one of those chips had fallen to the ground, nothing could have saved the ship, and everyone on board would have gone down with her."

When the old lady told this story she would say that she had distinctly seen the chips fly, and heard the noise of the chopping. She used to show the apron, which she never wore again, but kept, carefully put away, to be shown to anyone who liked to see it.

Can one wonder that the little man with his little axe and the little tree, and the unknown peril of death that came up from the sea, made a deep impression upon my mind, though not in any sense a haunting or unpleasant one? I longed to see the chips fly and the tiny tree bow to the sturdy strokes of the weird woodman.

Leaker's stories of ordinary witchcraft were many and curious, and though they cannot be set out here I must quote one or two lines in regard to them:

I do not think there was a place in the land so full of witches, white and black, as Dartmouth. My mother was, for her time and station, pretty fairly educated, yet she seemed to me to believe in them firmly.

The autobiography shows that when she was sitting alone, thinking and writing, the old nurse felt acutely the solitude and weariness of an old age that had outlived contemporaries as well as bodily faculties. When, however, the friends of another generation were with her, she never seemed too tired or too sad to enter keenly into all the interests of their lives. After a hopeful consultation with an oculist she writes:

Is it not strange, that when the most terrible trouble is a little better, what looked light in comparison with want of sight comes back as heavily as ever? How I wish I could be more thankful for the mercies I have and not be always longing for the unattainable.

Everyone who has lived through a great crisis has probably shared the old nurse's surprise at finding that smaller troubles, which for a while were reduced to nothingness, soon revive with our own return to ordinary life.

However [as she says] I will not go into reflections, but write of my young days. How all these things come back to me, a lone old woman who longs for, and yet is afraid of death. If I could only be sure, be sure! Is it possible there is no other state of being? Oh, God, it is too dreadful to think of.

Then she would turn to _Paradise Lost_, and how often have we not heard her repeat the lines:

And, in the lowest deep, a lower deep Still threatening to devour me, opens wide, finding, as Aristotle would have said, relief and even comfort in the "purgation" through poetry, of the passions of pity and terror.

I will end my account of Leaker with one of her memories of happier moods in which we can feel the magic of spring laying hold on the vivid imagination of the bright-eyed Devonshire girl:

One early spring day I heard my eldest brother tell my mother that he had seen a primrose. She said, "Do not tell Salome, for if she knows there will be no keeping her at home." But I had heard, and that was enough. Early next morning away I went, rambling all day from field to field, picking primroses. First a handful of the common yellow ones, then some coloured ones, and did ever a Queen prize jewels as I did those coloured flowers? But the joy in them only lasted a little while. I would next see some white ones, and then the coloured ones were thrown away, and I would set to work to gather the pale ones. Oh, how beautiful they looked! I can see them now, and almost feel the rapture I felt then. It makes me young again--almost. My dear mother used to say, "What do you do with all the flowers you pick? You never bring any home." I do not know what I did with them, but the joy of picking them was beyond expression. Have I ever felt such joy or happiness since?

CHAPTER IX

BOYHOOD: POETRY AND METRE

If I am to be exact, this chapter should have the sub-title of "Poetry and Metre," for poetry, other people's and my own, and an impassioned study of the metrical art, were the essential things about my boyhood. Between the ages of twelve and eighteen, at which time I may be said to have become grown-up, Poetry was my life.

My schoolboy period was not passed by me at school, except a term and a half at an excellent private school--one which still flourishes--the MacLaren School at Summertown. Rather reluctantly, for he was horrified by the bullying and cruelty which went on during his own day at English schools, my father consented to my mother's desire that we should go to school. After he had taken many precautions, and had ascertained that there was no bullying at Summertown, my elder brother and I were despatched to the school in question.

I was quite happy, got on well with the schoolmasters and with Mrs. MacLaren, the clever Scotswoman who ran the school, and gave satisfaction in everything except learning. In this matter I developed an extraordinary power of resistance, partly due, no doubt, to my bad eyesight. I was pronounced, in reports, to be a boy who gave no trouble and who was always happy and contented, and appeared to have good brains, and yet who, somehow or other, was easily surpassed at work by boys with inferior mental capacity.

My schoolfellows, I believe, thought me odd; but I made friends easily, and kept them. Though I could be "managed" by anyone who wanted to get something out of me, I was never put upon or bullied, because if attempts were made to coerce me, I was, like the immortal Mr. Micawber, not disinclined for a scrap. I stood erect before my fellow-boy, and when he tried to bully me I punched his head. Mr. Micawber's comment is too moving not to be recorded. "I and my fellow-man no longer meet upon those glorious terms." I and my fellow-schoolboy did occasionally meet upon those glorious terms, greatly to my enjoyment.

It happened, however, that there was an outbreak of scarlet fever in the school, and my father became anxious, and removed us at once--somewhat, I think, to my regret, but probably for my good. It was ultimately decided that my brother and I, instead of returning to MacLaren's, should, as I have already mentioned, go to the house of a clergyman, Mr. Philpott, who was the vicar of a neighbouring village, Chewton Mendip. The Vicarage was close to Chewton Priory, the house of my mother's closest friend, Lady Waldegrave.

Though Mr. Philpott was not an educational expert, in the modern sense, he was a man of good parts, fond of the arts, and something of a man of the world. His wife was a woman of great nobility of character and also of considerable mental power. She combined the qualities of a self- sacrificing and devoted mother with a certain ironic, or even sardonic, touch. She was a daughter of Mr. Tattersall, the owner of Tattersall's sale-rooms, and at her father's house she had become acquainted in the latter part of the 'fifties and the early 'sixties with all the great sporting characters of that epoch. Of these she used to tell us boys plenty of strange and curious anecdotes.

Chewton Mendip was only seven miles from Sutton, and so while there we were in constant touch with our own home life. We had also the amusement of seeing my father and mother when they went over, as they often did, to dine and sleep, or stay for longer visits, at the Priory. Lady Waldegrave was a great entertainer, and the house was thronged, not only with her country neighbours but with numbers of smart people from London--people such as Hayward, Bagehot, Lord Houghton, on the literary side, and men like Sir Walter Harcourt on the political. Again, picturesque figures in the European world, such as the Comte de Paris, the Due d'Aumale, were often guests, and there were always members of the Foreign Embassies and Legations. For example, it was at the Priory that I first saw a real alive American, in the shape of General Schenk, the United States Minister to the Court of St. James. I remember well his teaching the whole houseparty to play poker--a game till then quite unknown in England.

It was in the interval between leaving school and going to Chewton to the Philpotts that I began to read poetry for myself. Before, I had only loved it through my father's and Leaker's reading to us from Shakespeare, Scott, Byron, Spenser, Coleridge, Southey, and the old Ballads. When, however, I discovered that I could read poetry for myself, I tore the heart out of every book in the library that was in verse. Though my parents would have thought it an unforgivable crime to keep books from a child of theirs, for some reason or other I used to like in the summer-time to get up at about five or six o'clock (I was not a very good sleeper in those days, though I have been a perfect sleeper ever since), dress myself, run through the silent, sleeping house, and hide in the Great Parlour. There in absolute quietness and with a great sense of grandeur I got out my Byron or my Shelley, and raced though their pages in a delirium of delight. I can recall still, and most vividly, the sunlight streaming into the Great Parlour window, as I opened the great iron-sheathed shutters. Till breakfast-time I lolled on the big sofa, mouthing to myself explosive couplets from _Don Juan_. I am proud to say that, though I liked, as a boy should, the sentimentalism of the stanzas which begin

'Tis sweet to hear the watchdog's honest bark

I was equally delighted with

Sweet is a legacy, and passing sweet The unexpected death of some old lady.

The ironic mixture of emotion and sarcasm fascinated me.

No sooner were Byron, Shelley, and Keats explored than I fell tooth and nail upon Swinburne, Morris, and Rossetti, and every other possible poet of my generation. I forget the exact date on which I became enamoured of the Elizabethan dramatists, but it was some time between fourteen and sixteen, and when I did catch the fever, it was severe.

As everyone ought to do under such circumstances, I thought, or pretended to think, that Marlowe, Beaumont, Fletcher, Ben Jonson, Webster, and Ford were the equals, if not indeed the superiors, of Shakespeare.

That was a view with which my father by no means agreed, but with his kindly wisdom he never attempted to condemn or dispute my opinions. He