er and told
me that my grandfather was on board, and that night in my sleep I screamed
out and described the steamer's wreck. The next morning my grandfather
arrived on a blind horse found for him by grateful passengers. He had, as
I remember the story, been asleep when the captain aroused him to say they
were going on the rocks. He said, "have you tried sail on her?" and
judging from some answer that the captain was demoralised took over the
command and, when the ship could not be saved, got the crew and passengers
into the boats. His own boat was upset and he saved himself and some
others by swimming; some women had drifted ashore, buoyed up by their
crinolines. "I was not so much afraid of the sea as of that terrible man
with his oar," was the comment of a schoolmaster who was among the
survivors. Eight men were, however, drowned and my grandfather suffered
from that memory at intervals all his life, and if asked to read family
prayers never read anything but the shipwreck of St. Paul.

I remember the dogs more clearly than anyone except my grandfather and
grandmother. The black hairy one had no tail because it had been sliced
off, if I was told the truth, by a railway train. I think I followed at
their heels more than they did at mine, and that their journeys ended at a
rabbit-warren behind the garden; and sometimes they had savage fights, the
black hairy dog, being well protected by its hair, suffering least. I can
remember one so savage that the white dog would not take his teeth out of
the black dog's hair till the coachman hung them over the side of a
water-butt, one outside and one in the water. My grandmother once told the
coachman to cut the hair like a lion's hair and, after a long consultation
with the stable-boy, he cut it all over the head and shoulders and left
it on the lower part of the body. The dog disappeared for a few days and I
did not doubt that its heart was broken. There was a large garden behind
the house full of apple-trees with flower-beds and grass-plots in the
centre and two figure-heads of ships, one among the strawberry plants
under a wall covered with fruit trees and one among the flowers. The one
among the flowers was a white lady in flowing robes, while the other, a
stalwart man in uniform, had been taken from a three-masted ship of my
grandfather's called "The Russia," and there was a belief among the
servants that the stalwart man represented the Tsar and had been presented
by the Ts