f that impassability may
have made his intercourse with them the easier--at any rate, on
his side. On their side, they regarded him with a dim but always
self-complacent curiosity; had he not been a consul, they would probably
not have regarded him at all. Of course they--the Rock Park sort of
people--had never read his books; literary cultivation was not to
be found in England lower down than the gentleman class. My father,
therefore, was never obliged to say, "I'm glad you liked it" to them.
And that relief, of itself, must have served as a substantial bond of
fellowship.

Rock Park, as I remember it, was a damp, winding, verdurous street,
protected at each end by a small granite lodge, and studded throughout
its length with stuccoed villas. The villas were mended-on to each other
(as one of the children expressed it) two and two; they had front yards
filled with ornamental shrubbery, and gardens at the back, an acre or
two in extent; they were fenced in with iron pickets, and there were
gates to the driveways, on which the children swung. Every normal child
supposes that gates are made for no other purpose. The trees were not
large, but there were many of them, and they were thick with leaves.
There was a damp, arboreal smell everywhere, mingled with the finer
perfume of flowers and of the hawthorns and yellow laburnums. Flowers,
especially purple English violets, grew profusely in the gardens, and
gooseberry-bushes, bearing immense gooseberries such as our climate
does not nourish. There were also armies of garden--snails, handsome
gasteropods, which were of great interest to me; for I was entering,
at this period, upon a passionate pursuit of natural history. For many
years I supposed that the odor of the violets proceeded from snails, and
to this day I always associate snails with violets, or vice versa. Una,
Rose, and I were given each a section of a garden-bed for our own; I
cultivated mine so assiduously that it became quite a deep hole; but I
do not recall that anything ever grew in it. The soil was a very rich
loam, and ceaseless diligence must have been required in me to keep it
barren.

Gray skies, frequent showers, a cool or semi-chilly mildness, varied
every little while by the intrusion of a yellow fog from Liverpool,
over the river--such was the climate of Rock Park. There were occasional
passages of sunshine; but never, that I recollect, an entire day of it.
The stucco of the villas was streaked with