poets have by instinct. "In moments of grief and despair,"
he wrote in later life, "I do not, as some do, crouch back to the
bosom of the great Mother; she has, it seems, no heart for me when I
am sorry, though she smiles with me when I am glad." But he has told
me that he is able to enjoy a simple village scene in a way that
others can not easily understand: a chestnut crowded with pink
spires, the clack of a mill-wheel, the gush of a green sluice out
of a mantled pool, a little stream surrounded by flags and water
lobelias, gave him all his life a keen satisfaction in his happy
moments. "I always gravitate to water," he writes. "I could stop
and look at a little wayside stream for hours; and a pool--I never
tire of it, though it awes me when I am alone."

The boy was afraid of trees, as many children are. If he had to go
out alone he always crossed the fields, and never went by the wood;
wandering in a wood at night was a childish nightmare of a peculiarly
horrible kind.

I quote a few childish stories about him, selecting them out of a
large number.

His mother saying to him one day that the gardener was dead, he burst
out laughing (with that curious hysteria so common in children), and
then after a little asked if they were going to bury him.

His mother, wishing to familiarize him with the idea of continued
existence after death, dwelt on the fact that it was only his body
that was going to be buried: his soul was in heaven.

The boy said presently, "If his body is in the churchyard, and his
soul in heaven, where is David?"

Upon which his mother sent him down to the farm.

He was often singularly old-fashioned in his ways. If he was kept
indoors by a childish ailment, he would draw his chair up to the
fire, by his nurse, and say, "Now that the children are gone out,
nurse, we can have a quiet talk." And he always returned first of all
his brothers and sisters, if they were playing in the garden, that he
might have the pleasure of clapping his hands from the nursery window
to summon them in. "Children, children, come in," he used to say.

A curious little dialogue is preserved by his aunt in a diary. He
laughed so immoderately at something that was said at lunch by one of
his elders, that when his father inquired what the joke was, he was
unable to answer. "It must be something very funny," said his mother
in explanation. "Arthur never laughs unless there is a joke." The
little boy became grave at once, a