some more, for Jesus Christ’s sake.  Amen.”  Many quaint little religious reflections and scriptural allusions are interspersed throughout the book.  In one place he declares that “without papa and mamma the garden would be to me what the wilderness was to John the Baptist;” while again he offers up a pathetic prayer for a baby-brother; and throughout we are struck by the fact that his religion was pre-eminently one of love.  Charlie’s educational advantages were of the noblest and best, home-training largely predominating.  In the ninth chapter he refers in a simple matter-of-fact way to his early studies:  “Mamma devotes her time in teaching me and in reading instructive books with me.  Papa tells me about the productions of the earth, rivers, mountains, valleys, mines, and, most wonderful of all, the formation of the human body.”  Further on we read:  “Nothing of any great importance occurred now for some time.  My life was spent quietly in the country, as the child of a Wiltshire clergyman ought, mamma devoting her time in teaching me, and my daily play going on the same, till at last papa and mamma took me to the splendid capital of England.”  However much this brilliant transition may have dazzled him, he still prefers his quiet country home, arguing thus:  “As to living there [in London], I should not like it.  The reason why—­because its noisy riots in the streets suit not my mood like the tranquil streams and the waving trees I love in England’s country....  ’Tis true—­oh, how true!—­in the poetic words of Mr. Shakespeare, ’Man made the town, God made the country.’”

Despite the stilted style and absurdly pompous descriptions, with an occasional terrible breakdown, Charlie’s love of Nature, and especially of the animal creation, seems to have been most genuine.  He speaks of “the wide ocean which when angry roars and clashes over the beach, but when calm crabs are seen crawling on the shore and the sun shines bright over the waves,” and of “the billows rolling over each other and foaming over the rough stones,” with an apparently real enthusiasm.  The softer emotions of his nature were engrossed in this way, as we infer from the negative evidence afforded by his autobiography that he reached his seventh year without any experience of the tender passion.

His physiological ideas in the speculations regarding the origin of a baby-brother are naively expressed:  “One day I was told that a baby was born [this was when he was three years and a half old], and upon going into mamma’s bedroom I saw a red baby lying in an arm-chair wrapped in swaddling-clothes.  It puzzled me very much to think how he came into the world:  it was mysterious, very, and I cannot make it out now.  My first thought was, that he must have had airy wings, and after he had come they had disappeared.  My second thought was that he was so very little as to be able to come through the keyhole, and increased rapidly in size, just as it says in the Bible that a grain of mustard-seed springs to be so large a tree that the fowls of the air can roost upon it.”