his
sermons, instead of consisting of a string of pious platitudes,
interspersed with trite ejaculations and irrelevant quotations, were
one long chain of closely-reasoned argument. Granted his first premiss,
his second point followed logically from it, and so he led his hearers
on point by point, all closely argued, to an indisputable conclusion. I
suppose that the inexorable logic of it all appealed to the Scottish
side of me. His preaching had the same fascination for me that Euclid's
propositions exercised later, even on my hopelessly unmathematical mind.

Whatever the weather, we invariably walked home from Drury Lane to
South Audley Street, a long trudge for young feet, as my mother had
scruples about using the carriages on Sundays.

Neither my father nor my mother ever dined out on a Sunday, nor did
they invite people to dinner on that day, for they wished as far as
possible to give those in their employment a day of rest. All quite
hopelessly Victorian! for, after all, why should people ever think of
anybody but themselves?

Dr. Cumming was a great bee-fancier, and a recognised authority on
bees. Calling one day on my mother, he brought with him four queen-bees
of a new breed, each one encased in a little paper bag. He prided
himself on his skill in handling bees, and proudly exhibited those
treasures to my mother. He replaced them in their paper bags, and being
a very absent-minded man, he slipped the bags into the tail pocket of
his clerical frock-coat. Soon after he began one of his long arguments
(probably fixing the exact date of the end of the world), and, totally
oblivious of the presence of the bees in his tail pocket, he leant
against the mantelpiece. The queen-bees, naturally resenting the
pressure, stung him through the cloth on that portion of his anatomy
immediately nearest to their temporary prison. Dr. Cumming yelled with
pain, and began skipping all round the room. It so tickled my fancy to
see the grim and austere minister, who towered above me in the pulpit
every Sunday, executing a sort of solo-Jazz dance up and down the big
room, punctuated with loud cries, that I rolled about on the floor with
laughter.

The London of the "sixties" was a very dark and dingy place. The
streets were sparingly lit with the dimmest of gas-jets set very far
apart: the shop-windows made no display of lights, and the general
effect was one of intense gloom.

Until I was seven years old, I had never left the