is reconciliation of Scripture statements and
geological deductions was welcomed nowhere, as Darwin continued
silent, and the youthful Huxley was scornful, and even Charles
Kingsley, from whom my Father had expected the most instant
appreciation, wrote that he could not 'give up the painful and
slow conclusion of five and twenty years' study of geology, and
believe that God has written on the rocks one enormous and
superfluous lie',--as all this happened or failed to happen, a
gloom, cold and dismal, descended upon our morning teacups. It
was what the poets mean by an 'inspissated' gloom; it thickened
day by day, as hope and self-confidence evaporated in thin clouds
of disappointment. My Father was not prepared for such a fate. He
had been the spoiled darling of the public, the constant
favourite of the press, and now, like the dark angels of old,

so huge a rout
Encumbered him with ruin.

He could not recover from amazement at having offended everybody
by an enterprise which had been undertaken in the cause of
universal reconciliation.

During that grim season, my Father was no lively companion, and
circumstance after circumstance combined to drive him further
from humanity. He missed more than ever the sympathetic ear of my
Mother; there was present to support him nothing of that artful,
female casuistry which insinuates into the wounded consciousness
of a man the conviction that, after all, he is right and all the
rest of the world is wrong. My Father used to tramp in solitude
around and around the red ploughed field which was going to be
his lawn, or sheltering himself from the thin Devonian rain, pace
up and down the still-naked verandah where blossoming creepers
were to be. And I think that there was added to his chagrin with
all his fellow mortals a first tincture of that heresy which was
to attack him later on. It was now that, I fancy, he began, in
his depression, to be angry with God. How much devotion had he
given, how many sacrifices had he made, only to be left storming
around this red morass with no one in all the world to care for
him except one pale-faced child with its cheek pressed to the
window!

After one or two brilliant excursions to the sea, winter, in its
dampest, muddiest, most languid form, had fallen upon us and shut
us in. It was a dreary winter for the wifeless man and the
motherless boy. We had come into the house, in precipitate
abandonment to that supposed answer to