was (to use a term he would not have understood)
and his description, given, as I can see now, as if he were telling of any
other fact of physical life, made me miserable for weeks. After the first
impression wore off, I began to doubt if he had spoken truth, but one day
I discovered a passage in the encyclopaedia, though I only partly
understood its long words, that confirmed what he had said. I did not know
enough to be shocked at his relation to the elder boy, but it was the
first breaking of the dream of childhood.

My realization of death came when my father and mother and my two brothers
and my two sisters were on a visit. I was in the Library when I heard feet
running past and heard somebody say in the passage that my younger
brother, Robert, had died. He had been ill for some days. A little later
my sister and I sat at the table, very happy, drawing ships with their
flags half-mast high. We must have heard or seen that the ships in the
harbour had their flags at half-mast. Next day at breakfast I heard people
telling how my mother and the servant had heard the banshee crying the
night before he died. It must have been after this that I told my
grandmother I did not want to go with her when she went to see old
bed-ridden people because they would soon die.

V

At length when I was eight or nine an aunt said to me, "you are going to
London. Here you are somebody. There you will be nobody at all." I knew at
the time that her words were a blow at my father, not at me, but it was
some years before I knew her reason. She thought so able a man as my
father could have found out some way of painting more popular pictures if
he had set his mind to it and that it was wrong of him "to spend every
evening at his club." She had mistaken, for what she would have considered
a place of wantonness, Heatherley's Art School.

My mother and brother and sister were at Sligo perhaps when I was sent to
England, for my father and I and a group of landscape painters lodged at
Burnham Beeches with an old Mr. and Mrs. Earle. My father was painting the
first big pond you come to if you have driven from Slough through Farnham
Royal. He began it in spring and painted all through the year, the picture
changing with the seasons, and gave it up unfinished when he had painted
the snow upon the heath-covered banks. He is never satisfied and can never
make himself say that any picture is finished. In the evening he heard me
my lessons or read