erior age, at dinner-time: "May not Annie have a knife to-day, as
she is four years old?"

It was a sore grievance during that same year, 1851, that I was not
judged old enough to go to the Great Exhibition, and I have a faint
memory of my brother consolingly bringing me home one of those folding
pictured strips that are sold in the streets, on which were imaged
glories that I longed only the more to see. Far-away, dusky, trivial
memories, these. What a pity it is that a baby cannot notice, cannot
observe, cannot remember, and so throw light on the fashion of the
dawning of the external world on the human consciousness. If only we
could remember how things looked when they were first imaged on the
retinae; what we felt when first we became conscious of the outer world;
what the feeling was as faces of father and mother grew out of the
surrounding chaos and became familiar things, greeted with a smile,
lost with a cry; if only memory would not become a mist when in later
years we strive to throw our glances backward into the darkness of our
infancy, what lessons we might learn to help our stumbling psychology,
how many questions might be solved whose answers we are groping for in
the West in vain.

The next scene that stands out clearly against the background of the
past is that of my father's death-bed. The events which led to his
death I know from my dear mother. He had never lost his fondness for
the profession for which he had been trained, and having many medical
friends, he would now and then accompany them on their hospital rounds,
or share with them the labours of the dissecting-room. It chanced that
during the dissection of the body of a person who had died of rapid
consumption, my father cut his finger against the edge of the
breast-bone. The cut did not heal easily, and the finger became swollen
and inflamed. "I would have that finger off, Wood, if I were you," said
one of the surgeons, a day or two afterwards, on seeing the state of
the wound. But the others laughed at the suggestion, and my father, at
first inclined to submit to the amputation, was persuaded to "leave
Nature alone."

About the middle of August, 1852, he got wet through, riding on the top
of an omnibus, and the wetting resulted in a severe cold, which
"settled on his chest." One of the most eminent doctors of the day, as
able as he was rough in manner, was called to see him. He examined him
carefully, sounded his lungs, and left the room f