ful before I
left the room.

Pony-riding, and lessons in boxing and wrestling, and lessons in French
from a French governess, at whose appearance my father always seemed
to be beginning to dance a minuet, so exuberantly courteous was he; and
lessons in Latin from a tutor, whom my father invited to dinner once a
fortnight, but did not distinguish otherwise than occasionally to take
down Latin sentences in a notebook from his dictation, occupied my
mornings. My father told the man who instructed me in the art of
self-defence that our family had always patronized his profession. I
wrestled ten minutes every day with this man's son, and was regularly
thrown. On fine afternoons I was dressed in black velvet for a drive in
the park, where my father uncovered his head to numbers of people, and
was much looked at. 'It is our duty, my son, never to forget names and
persons; I beg you to bear that in mind, my dearest Richie,' he said. We
used to go to his opera-box; and we visited the House of Lords and the
House of Commons; and my father, though he complained of the decay of
British eloquence, and mourned for the days of Chatham, and William
Pitt (our old friend of the cake and the raspberry jam), and Burke, and
Sheridan, encouraged the orators with approving murmurs.

My father no longer laid stress on my studies of the Peerage. 'Now I
have you in the very atmosphere, that will come of itself,' he said. I
wished to know whether I was likely to be transported suddenly to some
other place. He assured me that nothing save a convulsion of the earth
would do it, which comforted me, for I took the firmness of the earth
in perfect trust. We spoke of our old Sunday walks to St. Paul's and
Westminster Abbey as of a day that had its charm. Our pew among a
fashionable congregation pleased him better. The pew-opener curtseyed
to none as she did to him. For my part, I missed the monuments and the
chants, and something besides that had gone--I knew not what. At the
first indication of gloom in me, my father became alarmed, and, after
making me stand with my tongue out before himself and Mrs. Waddy, like a
dragon in a piece of tapestry, would resume his old playfulness, and try
to be the same that he had been in Mrs. Waddy's lodgings. Then we read
the Arabian Nights together, or, rather, he read them to me, often
acting out the incidents as we rode or drove abroad. An omission to
perform a duty was the fatal forgetfulness to sprinkle pepper