lling an enormous improvised story, each taking an
alternate chapter, and each leaving the knots to be untied by the next
narrator. Hugh was very lively and ingenious in this, and proved the
most delightful of companions, though we had to admit as we returned
together that we had ruined the romance of our family history beyond
repair.

[Illustration: _Photo by Elliott & Fry_

ROBERT HUGH BENSON

IN 1893. AGED 21

As an Undergraduate at Cambridge.]

Hugh did very little work at Cambridge; he had given up classics, and
was working at theology, with a view to taking Orders. He managed to
secure a Third in the Tripos; he showed no intellectual promise
whatever; he was a very lively and amusing companion and a keen debater;
I think he wrote a little poetry; but he had no very pronounced tastes.
I remember his pointing out to me the windows of an extremely
unattractive set of ground-floor rooms in Whewell's Court as those which
he had occupied till he migrated to the Bishop's Hostel, eventually
moving to the Great Court. They look down Jesus Lane, and the long,
sombre wall of Sidney Sussex Garden. A flagged passage runs down to the
right of them, and the sitting-room is on the street. They were dark,
stuffy, and extremely noisy. The windows were high up, and splashed with
mud by the vehicles in the street, while it was necessary to keep them
shut, because otherwise conversation was wholly inaudible. "What did you
do there?" I said. "Heaven knows!" he answered. "As far as I can
remember, I mostly sat up late at night and played cards!" He certainly
spent a great deal of money. He had a good allowance, but he had so much
exceeded it at the end of his first year, that a financial crisis
followed, and my mother paid his debts for him. He had kept no accounts,
and he had entertained profusely.

The following letter from my father to him refers to one of Hugh's
attempts to economise. He caught a bad feverish cold at Cambridge as a
result of sleeping in a damp room, and was carried off to be nursed by
my uncle, Henry Sidgwick:

Addington Park, Croydon,

_26th Jan._ 1891.

Dearest Hughie,--I was rather disturbed to hear that you
imagined that what I said in October about not _needlessly
indulging_ was held by you to forbid your having a fire in your
bedroom on the ground floor in the depth of such a winter