were written the names of his grandfather and grandmother, of his father and of his father’s brother and sister, with the dates on which they were born and baptized and confirmed.  What a long time ago his father was born! 1840.  He asked his mother once about this Uncle Henry and Aunt Helen; but she told him they had quarrelled with his father, and she had said nothing more about them.  Mark had been struck by the notion that grown-up people could quarrel:  he had supposed quarrelling to be peculiar to childhood.  Further, he noticed that Henry Lidderdale had married somebody called Ada Prewbody who had died the same year; but nothing was said in the oval that enshrined his father about his having married anyone.  He asked his mother the reason of this, and she explained to him that the Bible had belonged to his grandfather who had kept the entries up to date until he died, when the Bible came to his eldest son who was Mark’s father.

“Does it worry you, darling, that I’m not entered?” his mother had asked with a smile.

“Well, it does rather,” Mark had replied, and then to his great delight she took a pen and wrote that James Lidderdale had married Grace Alethea Trehawke on June 28th, 1880, at St. Tugdual’s Church, Nancepean, Cornwall, and to his even greater delight that on April 25th, 1881, Mark Lidderdale had been born at 142 Lima Street, Notting Dale, London, W., and baptized on May 21st, 1881, at St. Wilfred’s Mission Church, Lima Street.

“Happy now?” she had asked.

Mark had nodded, and from that moment, if he went into his father’s study, he always opened the Family Bible and examined solemnly his own short history wreathed in forget-me-nots and lilies of the valley.

This afternoon, after looking as usual at the entry of his birth and baptism written in his mother’s pretty pointed handwriting, he searched for Dante’s Inferno illustrated by Gustave Dore, a large copy of which had recently been presented to his father by the Servers and Choir of St. Wilfred’s.  The last time he had been looking at this volume he had caught a glimpse of a lot of people buried in the ground with only their heads sticking out, a most attractive picture which he had only just discovered when he had heard his father’s footsteps and had closed the book in a hurry.

Mark tried to find this picture, but the volume was large and the pictures on the way of such fascination that it was long before he found it.  When he did, he thought it even more satisfying at a second glance, although he wished he knew what they were all doing buried in the ground like that.  Mark was not satisfied with horrors even after he had gone right through the Dante; in fact, his appetite was only whetted, and he turned with relish to a large folio of Chinese tortures, in the coloured prints of which a feature was made of blood profusely outpoured and richly tinted.  One picture of a Chinaman apparently impervious to the pain of being slowly