The abundant energy which my Mother now threw into her public work did not affect the quietude of our private life.  We had some visitors in the daytime, people who came to consult one parent or the other.  But they never stayed to a meal, and we never returned their visits.  I do not quite know how it was that neither of my parents took me to any of the sights of London, although I am sure it was a question of principle with them.  Notwithstanding all our study of natural history, I was never introduced to live wild beasts at the Zoo, nor to dead ones at the British Museum.  I can understand better why we never visited a picture-gallery or a concert-room.  So far as I can recollect, the only time I was ever taken to any place of entertainment was when my Father and I paid a visit, long anticipated, to the Great Globe in Leicester Square.  This was a huge structure, the interior of which one ascended by means of a spiral staircase.  It was a poor affair; that was concave in it which should have been convex, and my imagination was deeply affronted.  I could invent a far better Great Globe than that in my mind’s eye in the garret.

Being so restricted, then, and yet so active, my mind took refuge in an infantile species of natural magic.  This contended with the definite ideas of religion which my parents were continuing, with too mechanical a persistency, to force into my nature, and it ran parallel with them.  I formed strange superstitions, which I can only render intelligible by naming some concrete examples.  I persuaded myself that, if I could only discover the proper words to say or the proper passes to make, I could induce the gorgeous birds and butterflies in my Father’s illustrated manuals to come to life, and fly out of the book, leaving holes behind them.  I believed that, when, at the Chapel, we sang, drearily and slowly, loud hymns of experience and humiliation, I could boom forth with a sound equal to that of dozens of singers, if I could only hit upon the formula.  During morning and evening prayers, which were extremely lengthy and fatiguing, I fancied that one of my two selves could flit up, and sit clinging to the cornice, and look down on my other self and the rest of us, if I could only find the key.  I laboured for hours in search of these formulas, thinking to compass my ends by means absolutely irrational.  For example, I was convinced that if I could only count consecutive numbers long enough, without losing one, I should suddenly, on reaching some far-distant figure, find myself in possession of the great secret.  I feel quite sure that nothing external suggested these ideas of magic, and I think it probable that they approached the ideas of savages at a very early stage of development.