to our own devices, my Father would mainly be reading his book or paper held close up to the candle, while his lips and heavy eyebrows occasionally quivered and palpitated, with literary ardour, in a manner strangely exciting to me.  Miss Marks, in a very high cap, and her large teeth shining, would occasionally appear in the doorway, desiring, with spurious geniality, to know how we were ‘getting on’.  But on these occasions neither of us replied to Miss Marks.

Sometimes in the course of this winter, my Father and I had long cosy talks together over the fire.  Our favourite subject was murders.  I wonder whether little boys of eight, soon to go upstairs alone at night, often discuss violent crime with a widower-papa?  The practice, I cannot help thinking, is unusual; it was, however, consecutive with us.  We tried other secular subjects, but we were sure to come around at last to ’what do you suppose they really did with the body?’ I was told, a thrilled listener, the adventure of Mrs. Manning, who killed a gentleman on the stairs and buried him in quick-lime in the back-kitchen, and it was at this time that I learned the useful historical fact, which abides with me after half a century, that Mrs. Manning was hanged in black satin, which thereupon went wholly out of fashion in England.  I also heard about Burke and Hare, whose story nearly froze me into stone with horror.

These were crimes which appear in the chronicles.  But who will tell me what ‘the Carpet-bag Mystery’ was, which my Father and I discussed evening after evening?  I have never come across a whisper of it since, and I suspect it of having been a hoax.  As I recall the details, people in a boat, passing down the Thames, saw a carpet-bag hung high in air, on one of the projections of a pier of Waterloo Bridge.  Being with difficulty dragged down—­or perhaps up—­this bag was found to be full of human remains, dreadful butcher’s business of joints and fragments.  Persons were missed, were identified, were again denied—­the whole is a vapour in my memory which shifts as I try to define it.  But clear enough is the picture I hold of myself, in a high chair, on the left-hand side of the sitting-room fireplace, the leaping flames reflected in the glass-case of tropical insects on the opposite wall, and my Father, leaning anxiously forward, with uplifted finger, emphasizing to me the pros and cons of the horrible carpet-bag evidence.

I suppose that my interest in these discussions—­and Heaven knows I was animated enough—­amused and distracted my Father, whose idea of a suitable theme for childhood’s ear now seems to me surprising.  I soon found that these subjects were not welcome to everybody, for, starting the Carpet-bag Mystery one morning with Miss Marks, in the hope of delaying my arithmetic lesson, she fairly threw her apron over her ears, and told me, from that vantage, that if I did not desist at once, she should scream.