and accidentally discovered that he was exactly the same age that I was.  This, and the fact that he was a meditative and sober little boy, attracted us all still further to George, who became converted under one of my Father’s sermons.  He attended my public baptism, and was so much moved by this ceremony that he passionately desired to be baptized also, and was in fact so immersed, a few months later, slightly to my chagrin, since I thereupon ceased to be the only infant prodigy in communion.  When we were both in our thirteenth year, George became an outdoor servant to us, and did odd jobs under the gardener.  My Father, finding him, as he said, ’docile, obedient and engaging’, petted George a good deal, and taught him a little botany.  He called George, by a curious contortion of thought, my ‘spiritual foster-brother’, and anticipated for him, I think, a career, like mine, in the Ministry.

Our garden suffered from an incursion of slugs, which laid the verbenas in the dust, and shore off the carnations as if with pairs of scissors.  To cope with this plague we invested in a drake and a duck, who were christened Philemon and Baucis.  Every night large cabbage-leaves, containing the lees of beer, were spread about the flower-beds as traps, and at dawn these had become green parlours crammed with intoxicated slugs.  One of George’s earliest morning duties was to free Philemon and Baucis from their coop, and, armed with a small wand, to guide their footsteps to the feast in one cabbage-leaf after another.  My Father used to watch this performance from an upper window, and, in moments of high facetiousness, he was wont to parody the poet Gray: 

  How jocund doth George drive his team afield!

This is all, or almost all, that I remember about George’s occupations, but he was singularly blameless.

My Father’s plan now was that I should form a close intimacy with George, as a boy of my own age, of my own faith, of my own future.  My stepmother, still in bondage to the social conventions, was passionately troubled at this, and urged the barrier of class-differences.  My Father replied that such an intimacy would keep me ‘lowly’, and that from so good a boy as George I could learn nothing undesirable.  ’He will encourage him not to wipe his boots when he comes into the house,’ said my stepmother, and my Father sighed to think how narrow is the horizon of Woman’s view of heavenly things.

In this caprice, if I may call it so, I think that my Father had before him the fine republican example of ‘Sandford and Merton’, some parts of which book he admired extremely.  Accordingly George and I were sent out to take walks together, and as we started, my Father, with an air of great benevolence, would suggest some passage of Scripture, or ’some aspect of God’s bountiful scheme in creation, on which you may profitably meditate together.’  George and I never pursued the discussion of the text with which my Father started us for more than a minute or two; then we fell into silence, or investigated current scenes and rustic topics.