nd this was
his first remembered touch of personal vanity.

He was walking and crying in an old-fashioned village street, crying
because his fat small thighs were chafing one another. It was Sunday,
or a holiday, for his father was in a tall silk hat and black broadcloth
and high collar, and a satin stock which fastened with a shiny buckle
high up in the neck behind. His father stooped and lifted him, and
carried him all the way to an old house with three front-doors, and
porches over the doors, and a cage with two doves in it hanging on the
lichened wall. There was a hedged garden opposite the house, with four
poplars in the hedgerow. Their tops went right into the blue. Inside the
old house was an old gentleman who was called Uncle. Round the room he
sat in were hung a number of fiddles in green-baize bags. How he had
learned what the bags held the child could not tell, but he knew.
The old gentleman took him on his knee, and allowed him to touch his
whiskers, which were crisp and soft, and snipped pieces of white paper
into the shapes of trees and animals and houses, with a little pair of
scissors. He had blue veins on the back of his white hands, and little
cords the like of which were not on the child's, as examination proved.
This was his first memory of any house which was not home.

There he first saw a piano. It was open, and he beat the keys, sounding
now one note at a time and now two or three together. This was a
fascinating exercise, but he was bidden to desist from it, and was given
a picture-book to look at It was full of wiry-looking steel plates of
men in cauldrons, and on crucifixes, and on racks, and bound to stakes
in fires. He remembered it as Foxe's 'Book of Martyrs,' but by a later
knowledge.

There was a well in a yard, with a rope and a windlass, and an old
wooden bucket all over trailing green mosses. Off the yard there was a
blacksmith's shop, with a disused anvil and disused tools in it, and a
cold hearth covered with scattered slack and iron filings. A dog, whose
chain allowed him to come within a yard of the door of this workshop,
woke up at the clank of the tools and barked. The child cried until his
mother came and took him away with some show of angry impatience, not
with his father's gentleness. He knew her for his mother, of course, but
this was his first remembrance of her.

It was baking-day, and so it could not have been a Sunday. In a big
'jowl' of earthenware--that was the loc