n of how strangely unadventurous in the matter of exploration one
had always been as a boy. It was true that we children had scampered
with my father's master-key from end to end of the Cathedral--wet
mornings used constantly to be spent there--so that I know every
staircase, gallery, clerestory, parapet, triforium, and roof-vault of
the building--but I found in the close itself many houses, alleys,
little streets, which I had actually never seen, or even suspected
their existence.

It was all full of little ghosts, and a tiny vignette shaped itself in
memory at every corner, of some passing figure--a good-natured Canon,
a youthful friend, Levite or Nethinim, or some deadly enemy, the son
perhaps of some old-established denizen of the close, with whom for
some unknown reason the Chancery schoolroom proclaimed an inflexible
feud.

But when I came to see the old house itself--so little changed, so
distinctly recollected--then I was indeed amazed at the torrent of
little happy fragrant memories which seemed to pour from every doorway
and window--the games, the meals, the plays, the literary projects,
the readings, the telling of stories, the endless, pointless,
enchanting wanderings with some breathless object in view, forgotten
or transformed before it was ever attained or executed, of which
children alone hold the secret.

Best of all do I recollect long summer afternoons spent in the great
secluded high-walled garden at the back, with its orchard, its mound
covered with thickets, and the old tower of the city wall, which made
a noble fortress in games of prowess or adventure. I can see the
figure of my father in his cassock, holding a little book, walking up
and down among the gooseberry-beds half the morning, as he developed
one of his unwritten sermons for the Minster on the following day.

I do not remember that very affectionate relations existed between us
children; it was a society, based on good-humoured tolerance and a
certain democratic respect for liberty, that nursery group; it had its
cliques, its sections, its political emphasis, its diplomacies; but it
was cordial rather than emotional, and bound together by common
interests rather than by mutual devotion.

This, for instance, was one of the ludicrous incidents which came back
to me. There was an odd little mediaeval room on the ground-floor,
given up as a sort of study, in the school sense, to my elder brother
and myself. My younger brother, aged al