prayer, a great deal too
soon. In order to rake together the lump sum for buying it, my
Father had denuded himself of almost everything, and our sticks
of chairs and tables filled but two or three rooms. Half the
little house, or 'villa' as we called it, was not papered, two-
thirds were not furnished. The workmen were still finishing the
outside when we arrived, and in that connection I recall a little
incident which exhibits my Father's morbid delicacy of
conscience. He was accustomed in his brighter moments--and this
was before the publication of his 'Omphalos'--occasionally to
sing loud Dorsetshire songs of his early days, in a strange,
broad Wessex lingo that I loved. One October afternoon he and I
were sitting on the verandah, and my Father was singing; just
around the corner, out of sight, two carpenters were putting up
the framework of a greenhouse. In a pause, one of them said to
his fellow: 'He can zing a zong, zo well's another, though he be
a minister.' My Father, who was holding my hand loosely, clutched
it, and looking up, I saw his eyes darken. He never sang a
secular song again during the whole of his life.

Later in the year, and after his literary misfortune, his
conscience became more troublesome than ever. I think he
considered the failure of his attempt at the reconciliation of
science with religion to have been intended by God as a
punishment for something he had done or left undone. In those
brooding tramps around and around the garden, his soul was on its
knees searching the corners of his conscience for some sin of
omission or commission, and one by one every pleasure, every
recreation, every trifle scraped out of the dust of past
experience, was magnified into a huge offence. He thought that
the smallest evidence of levity, the least unbending to human
instinct, might be seized by those around him as evidence of
inconsistency, and might lead the weaker brethren into offence.
The incident of the carpenters and the comic song is typical of a
condition of mind which now possessed my Father, in which act
after act became taboo, not because each was sinful in itself,
but because it might lead others into sin.

I have the conviction that Miss Marks was now mightily afraid of
my Father. Whenever she could, she withdrew to the room she
called her 'boudoir', a small, chilly apartment, sparsely
furnished, looking over what was in process of becoming the
vegetable garden. Very properly, that she migh