My earliest personal recollections are of a house and garden that we lived in when I was three and four years of age, situated in Grove Road, St. John’s Wood.  I can remember my mother hovering round the dinner-table to see that all was bright for the home-coming husband; my brother—­two years older than myself—­and I watching “for papa”; the loving welcome, the game of romps that always preceded the dinner of the elder folks.  I can remember on the 1st of October, 1851, jumping up in my little cot, and shouting out triumphantly:  “Papa! mamma!  I am four years old!” and the grave demand of my brother, conscious of superior age, at dinner-time:  “May not Annie have a knife to-day, as she is four years old?”

It was a sore grievance during that same year, 1851, that I was not judged old enough to go to the Great Exhibition, and I have a faint memory of my brother consolingly bringing me home one of those folding pictured strips that are sold in the streets, on which were imaged glories that I longed only the more to see.  Far-away, dusky, trivial memories, these.  What a pity it is that a baby cannot notice, cannot observe, cannot remember, and so throw light on the fashion of the dawning of the external world on the human consciousness.  If only we could remember how things looked when they were first imaged on the retinae; what we felt when first we became conscious of the outer world; what the feeling was as faces of father and mother grew out of the surrounding chaos and became familiar things, greeted with a smile, lost with a cry; if only memory would not become a mist when in later years we strive to throw our glances backward into the darkness of our infancy, what lessons we might learn to help our stumbling psychology, how many questions might be solved whose answers we are groping for in the West in vain.

The next scene that stands out clearly against the background of the past is that of my father’s death-bed.  The events which led to his death I know from my dear mother.  He had never lost his fondness for the profession for which he had been trained, and having many medical friends, he would now and then accompany them on their hospital rounds, or share with them the labours of the dissecting-room.  It chanced that during the dissection of the body of a person who had died of rapid consumption, my father cut his finger against the edge of the breast-bone.  The cut did not heal easily, and the finger became swollen and inflamed.  “I would have that finger off, Wood, if I were you,” said one of the surgeons, a day or two afterwards, on seeing the state of the wound.  But the others laughed at the suggestion, and my father, at first inclined to submit to the amputation, was persuaded to “leave Nature alone.”