That same victory of the Alma, which was reported in London on my fifth birthday, is also marked very clearly in my memory by a family circumstance.  We were seated at breakfast, at our small round table drawn close up to the window, my Father with his back to the light.  Suddenly, he gave a sort of cry, and read out the opening sentences from The Times announcing a battle in the valley of the Alma.  No doubt the strain of national anxiety had been very great, for both he and my Mother seemed deeply excited.  He broke off his reading when the fact of the decisive victory was assured, and he and my Mother sank simultaneously on their knees in front of their tea and bread-and-butter, while in a loud voice my Father gave thanks to the God of Battles.  This patriotism was the more remarkable, in that he had schooled himself, as he believed, to put his ‘heavenly citizenship’ above all earthly duties.  To those who said:  ’Because you are a Christian, surely you are not less an Englishman?’ he would reply by shaking his head, and by saying:  ’I am a citizen of no earthly State’.  He did not realize that, in reality, and to use a cant phrase not yet coined in 1854, there existed in Great Britain no more thorough ‘Jingo’ than he.

Another instance of the remarkable way in which the interests of daily life were mingled in our strange household, with the practice of religion, made an impression upon my memory.  We had all three been much excited by a report that a certain dark geometer-moth, generated in underground stables, had been met with in Islington.  Its name, I think is, ‘Boletobia fuliginaria’, and I believe that it is excessively rare in England.  We were sitting at family prayers, on a summer morning, I think in 1855, when through the open window a brown moth came sailing.  My Mother immediately interrupted the reading of the Bible by saying to my Father, ‘O!  Henry, do you think that can be “Boletobia"?’ My Father rose up from the sacred book, examined the insect, which had now perched, and replied:  ’No! it is only the common Vapourer, “Orgyia antiqua"!’, resuming his seat, and the exposition of the Word, without any apology or embarrassment.

In the course of this, my sixth year, there happened a series of minute and soundless incidents which, elementary as they may seem when told, were second in real importance to none in my mental history.  The recollection of them confirms me in the opinion that certain leading features in each human soul are inherent to it, and cannot be accounted for by suggestion or training.  In my own case, I was most carefully withdrawn, like Princess Blanchefleur in her marble fortress, from every outside influence whatever, yet to me the instinctive life came as unexpectedly as her lover came to her in the basket of roses.  What came to me was the consciousness of self, as a force and as a companion, and it came as the result of one or two shocks, which I will relate.