But the difficulty still remained.  During these months what was to become of me?  My Father could not take me with him from hotel to hotel and from lecture-hall to lecture-hall.  Nor could he leave me, as people leave the domestic cat, in an empty house for the neighbours to feed at intervals.  The dilemma threatened to be insurmountable, when suddenly there descended upon us a kind, but little-known, paternal cousin from the west of England, who had heard of our calamities.  This lady had a large family of her own at Bristol; she offered to find room in it for me so long as ever my Father should be away in the north; and when my Father, bewildered by so much goodness, hesitated, she came up to London and carried me forcibly away in a whirlwind of good-nature.  Her benevolence was quite spontaneous; and I am not sure that she had not added to it already by helping to nurse our beloved sufferer through part of her illness.  Of that I am not positive, but I recollect very clearly her snatching me from our cold and desolate hearthstone, and carrying me off to her cheerful house at Clifton.

Here, for the first time, when half through my eighth year, I was thrown into the society of young people.  My cousins were none of them, I believe, any longer children, but they were youths and maidens busily engaged in various personal interests, all collected in a hive of wholesome family energy.  Everybody was very kind to me, and I sank back, after the strain of so many months, into mere childhood again.  This long visit to my cousins at Clifton must have been very delightful; I am dimly aware that it was—­yet I remember but few of its incidents.  My memory, so clear and vivid about earlier solitary times, now in all this society becomes blurred and vague.  I recollect certain pleasures; being taken, for instance, to a menagerie, and having a practical joke, in the worst taste, played upon me by the pelican.  One of my cousins, who was a medical student, showed me a pistol, and helped me to fire it; he smoked a pipe, and I was oddly conscious that both the firearm and the tobacco were definitely hostile to my ‘dedication’.  My girl-cousins took turns in putting me to bed, and on cold nights, or when they were in a hurry, allowed me to say my prayer under the bed-clothes instead of kneeling at a chair.  The result of this was further spiritual laxity, because I could not help going to sleep before the prayer was ended.

The visit to Clifton was, in fact, a blessed interval in my strenuous childhood.  It probably prevented my nerves from breaking down under the pressure of the previous months.  The Clifton family was God-fearing, in a quiet, sensible way, but there was a total absence of all the intensity and compulsion of our religious life at Islington.  I was not encouraged—­I even remember that I was gently snubbed—­when I rattled forth, parrot-fashion, the conventional phraseology of ‘the saints’.  For a short, enchanting period of respite, I lived the life