So confident were they of the reality of their intercourse with God, that they asked for no other guide.  They recognized no spiritual authority among men, they subjected themselves to no priest or minister, they troubled their consciences about no current manifestation of ‘religious opinion’.  They lived in an intellectual cell, bounded at its sides by the walls of their own house, but open above to the very heart of the uttermost heavens.

This, then, was the scene in which the soul of a little child was planted, not as in an ordinary open flower-border or carefully tended social parterre, but as on a ledge, split in the granite of some mountain.  The ledge was hung between night and the snows on one hand, and the dizzy depths of the world upon the other; was furnished with just soil enough for a gentian to struggle skywards and open its stiff azure stars; and offered no lodgement, no hope of salvation, to any rootlet which should stray beyond its inexorable limits.

CHAPTER II

Out of the darkness of my infancy there comes only one flash of memory.  I am seated alone, in my baby-chair, at a dinner-table set for several people.  Somebody brings in a leg of mutton, puts it down close to me, and goes out.  I am again alone, gazing at two low windows, wide open upon a garden.  Suddenly, noiselessly, a large, long animal (obviously a greyhound) appears at one window-sill, slips into the room, seizes the leg of mutton and slips out again.  When this happened I could not yet talk.  The accomplishment of speech came to me very late, doubtless because I never heard young voices.  Many years later, when I mentioned this recollection, there was a shout of laughter and surprise:  ’That, then, was what became of the mutton!  It was not you, who, as your Uncle A. pretended, ate it up, in the twinkling of an eye, bone and all!’

I suppose that it was the startling intensity of this incident which stamped it upon a memory from which all other impressions of this early date have vanished.

The adventure of the leg of mutton occurred, evidently, at the house of my Mother’s brothers, for my parents, at this date, visited no other.  My uncles were not religious men, but they had an almost filial respect for my Mother, who was several years senior to the elder of them.  When the catastrophe of my grandfather’s fortune had occurred, they had not yet left school.  My Mother, in spite of an extreme dislike of teaching, which was native to her, immediately accepted the situation of a governess in the family of an Irish nobleman.  The mansion was only to be approached, as Miss Edgeworth would have said, ’through eighteen sloughs, at the imminent peril of one’s life’, and when one had reached it, the mixture of opulence and squalor, of civility and savagery, was unspeakable.  But my Mother was well paid, and she stayed in this distasteful environment, doing the work she hated most, while with the margin of her salary she helped first one of her brothers and then the other through his Cambridge course.  They studied hard and did well at the university.  At length their sister received, in her ‘ultima Thule’, news that her younger brother had taken his degree, and then and there, with a sigh of intense relief, she resigned her situation and came straight back to England.