w
something of literature, but less of mathematics than I assume to be
known by the modern ten-year-old schoolboy; something of three or four
languages, but nothing of their grammar. I have met and talked with
some of the most notable people of my time, but truly prefer cottage
life before that of the greatest houses. And so, in a score of other
ways, I feel it difficult informingly and justly to label myself.

But--let me have done with difficulties and definitions. My task shall
be the setting forth of facts, out of which definitions must shape
themselves. And, for a beginning, I must turn aside from my present
self, pass by a number of dead selves, each differing in a thousand
ways from every other, and bring my mind to bear for the moment upon
that infinitely remote self: the child, Nicholas Freydon. It may be
that curious and distant infant will help to explain the man.

CHILDHOOD--ENGLAND

I

The things I remember about my earliest infancy are not in the least
romantic.

First, I think, come two pictures, both perfectly distinct, and both
connected with domestic servants. The one is of a firelit interior,
below street level: an immense kitchen, with shining copper vessels in
it, an extremely hot and red fire, and a tall screen covered over with
pictures. An enormously large woman in a blue and white print gown
sits toasting herself before the fire; and a less immense female, in
white print with sprays of pink flowers on it, is devoting herself to
me. This last was Amelia; a cheerful, comely, buxom, and in the main
kindly creature, as I remember her. In the kitchen was a well-scrubbed
table of about three-quarters of a mile in length, and possessed of as
many legs as a centipede, some of which could be moved to support
flaps. (To put a measuring-tape over that table nowadays, or over
other things in the kitchen, for that matter, might bring
disappointment, I suppose.) These legs formed fascinating walls and
boundaries for a series of romantic dwelling-places, shops, caves, and
suchlike resorts, among which a small boy could wander at will, when
lucky enough to be allowed to visit this warm apartment at all. The
whole place was pervaded by an odour indescribably pleasing to my
infantile nostrils, and compact of suggestions of heat acting upon
clean print gowns, tea-cakes done to a turn, scrubbed wood, and hot
soap-suds.

But the full ecstasy of a visit to this place was only attained when I
was li