In the course of that dismal winter, as the post began to bring in private letters, few and chilly, and public reviews, many and scornful, my Father looked in vain for the approval of the churches, and in vain for the acquiescence of the scientific societies, and in vain for the gratitude of those ’thousands of thinking persons’, which he had rashly assured himself of receiving.  As his reconciliation of Scripture statements and geological deductions was welcomed nowhere, as Darwin continued silent, and the youthful Huxley was scornful, and even Charles Kingsley, from whom my Father had expected the most instant appreciation, wrote that he could not ’give up the painful and slow conclusion of five and twenty years’ study of geology, and believe that God has written on the rocks one enormous and superfluous lie’,—­as all this happened or failed to happen, a gloom, cold and dismal, descended upon our morning teacups.  It was what the poets mean by an ‘inspissated’ gloom; it thickened day by day, as hope and self-confidence evaporated in thin clouds of disappointment.  My Father was not prepared for such a fate.  He had been the spoiled darling of the public, the constant favourite of the press, and now, like the dark angels of old,

            so huge a rout
  Encumbered him with ruin.

He could not recover from amazement at having offended everybody by an enterprise which had been undertaken in the cause of universal reconciliation.

During that grim season, my Father was no lively companion, and circumstance after circumstance combined to drive him further from humanity.  He missed more than ever the sympathetic ear of my Mother; there was present to support him nothing of that artful, female casuistry which insinuates into the wounded consciousness of a man the conviction that, after all, he is right and all the rest of the world is wrong.  My Father used to tramp in solitude around and around the red ploughed field which was going to be his lawn, or sheltering himself from the thin Devonian rain, pace up and down the still-naked verandah where blossoming creepers were to be.  And I think that there was added to his chagrin with all his fellow mortals a first tincture of that heresy which was to attack him later on.  It was now that, I fancy, he began, in his depression, to be angry with God.  How much devotion had he given, how many sacrifices had he made, only to be left storming around this red morass with no one in all the world to care for him except one pale-faced child with its cheek pressed to the window!

After one or two brilliant excursions to the sea, winter, in its dampest, muddiest, most languid form, had fallen upon us and shut us in.  It was a dreary winter for the wifeless man and the motherless boy.  We had come into the house, in precipitate abandonment to that supposed answer to prayer, a great deal too soon.  In order to rake together the lump sum for buying it, my Father had denuded himself of almost