wrote to the old woman that I was never
to be taught to sing again, and afterwards other teachers were told the
same thing. Presently my eldest sister came on a long visit and she and I
went to a little two-storeyed house in a poor street where an old
gentlewoman taught us spelling and grammar. When we had learned our lesson
well, we were allowed to look at a sword presented to her father who had
led troops in India or China and to spell out a long complimentary
inscription on the silver scabbard. As we walked to her house or home
again we held a large umbrella before us, both gripping the handle and
guiding ourselves by looking out of a round hole gnawed in the cover by a
mouse. When I had got beyond books of one syllable, I began to spend my
time in a room called the Library, though there were no books in it that I
can remember except some old novels I never opened and a many volumed
encyclopaedia published towards the end of the 18th century. I read this
encyclopaedia a great deal and can remember a long passage considering
whether fossil wood despite its appearance might not be only a curiously
shaped stone.

My father's unbelief had set me thinking about the evidences of religion
and I weighed the matter perpetually with great anxiety, for I did not
think I could live without religion. All my religious emotions were, I
think, connected with clouds and cloudy glimpses of luminous sky, perhaps
because of some bible picture of God's speaking to Abraham or the like.
At least I can remember the sight moving me to tears. One day I got a
decisive argument for belief. A cow was about to calve, and I went to the
field where the cow was with some farm-hands who carried a lantern, and
next day I heard that the cow had calved in the early morning. I asked
everybody how calves were born, and because nobody would tell me, made up
my mind that nobody knew. They were the gift of God, that much was
certain, but it was plain that nobody had ever dared to see them come, and
children must come in the same way. I made up my mind that when I was a
man I would wait up till calf or child had come. I was certain there would
be a cloud and a burst of light and God would bring the calf in the cloud
out of the light. That thought made me content until a boy of twelve or
thirteen, who had come on a visit for the day, sat beside me in a hay-loft
and explained all the mechanism of sex. He had learnt all about it from an
elder boy whose pathic he