these were the very pupils of the apostles themselves.  I never dreamed of forgeries, of pious frauds, of writings falsely ascribed to venerated names.  Nor do I now regret that so it was; for, without belief, the study of the early Fathers would be an intolerable weariness; and that old reading of mine has served me well in many of my later controversies with Christians, who knew the literature of their Church less well than I.

To this ecclesiastical reading was added some study of stray scientific works, but the number of these that came in my way was very limited.  The atmosphere surrounding me was literary rather than scientific.  I remember reading a translation of Plato that gave me great delight, and being rather annoyed by the insatiable questionings of Socrates.  Lord Derby’s translation of the Iliad also charmed me with its stateliness and melody, and Dante was another favorite study.  Wordsworth and Cowper I much disliked, and into the same category went all the 17th and 18th century “poets,” though I read them conscientiously through.  Southey fascinated me with his wealth of Oriental fancies, while Spencer was a favorite book, put beside Milton and Dante.  My novel reading was extremely limited; indeed the “three volume novel” was a forbidden fruit.  My mother regarded these ordinary love-stories as unhealthy reading for a young girl, and gave me Scott and Kingsley, but not Miss Braddon or Mrs. Henry Wood.  Nor would she take me to the theatre, though we went to really good concerts.  She had a horror of sentimentality in girls, and loved to see them bright and gay, and above all things absolutely ignorant of all evil things and of premature love-dreams.  Happy, healthy and workful were those too brief years.

IV.

My grandfather’s house, No. 8, Albert Square, Clapham Road, was a second home from my earliest childhood.

That house, with its little strip of garden at the back, will always remain dear and sacred to me.  I can see now the two almond trees, so rich in blossom every spring, so barren in fruit every autumn; the large spreading tufts of true Irish shamrock, brought from Ireland, and lovingly planted in the new grey London house, amid the smoke; the little nooks at the far end, wherein I would sit cosily out of sight reading a favorite book.  Inside it was but a commonplace London house, only one room, perhaps, differing from any one that might have been found in any other house in the square.  That was my grandfather’s “work-room”, where he had a lathe fitted up, for he had a passion and a genius for inventive work in machinery.  He took out patents for all sorts of ingenious contrivances, but always lost money.  His favorite invention was of a “railway chair”, for joining the ends of rails together, and in the ultimate success of this he believed to his death.  It was (and is) used on several lines, and was found to answer splendidly, but the old man never derived any profit from his invention.  The fact was he had no money, and those who had took it up and utilised it, and kept all the profit for themselves.  There were several cases in which his patents dropped, and then others took up his inventions, and made a commercial success thereof.