It is not to be wondered at, then, that my uncles looked up to their sister with feelings of especial devotion.  They were not inclined, they were hardly in a position, to criticize her modes of thought.  They were easy-going, cultured and kindly gentlemen, rather limited in their views, without a trace of their sister’s force of intellect or her strenuous temper.  E. resembled her in person, he was tall, fair, with auburn curls; he cultivated a certain tendency to the Byronic type, fatal and melancholy.  A. was short, brown and jocose, with a pretension to common sense; bluff and chatty.  As a little child, I adored my Uncle E., who sat silent by the fireside holding me against his knee, saying nothing, but looking unutterably sad, and occasionally shaking his warm-coloured tresses.  With great injustice, on the other hand, I detested my Uncle A., because he used to joke in a manner very displeasing to me, and because he would so far forget himself as to chase, and even, if it will be credited, to tickle me.  My uncles, who remained bachelors to the end of their lives, earned a comfortable living; E. by teaching, A. as ’something in the City’, and they rented an old rambling house in Clapton, that same in which I saw the greyhound.  Their house had a strange, delicious smell, so unlike anything I smelt anywhere else, that it used to fill my eyes with tears of mysterious pleasure.  I know now that this was the odour of cigars, tobacco being a species of incense tabooed at home on the highest religious grounds.

It has been recorded that I was slow in learning to speak.  I used to be told that having met all invitations to repeat such words as ‘Papa’ and ‘Mamma’ with gravity and indifference, I one day drew towards me a volume, and said ‘book’ with startling distinctness.  I was not at all precocious, but at a rather early age, I think towards the beginning of my fourth year, I learned to read.  I cannot recollect a time when a printed page of English was closed to me.  But perhaps earlier still my Mother used to repeat to me a poem which I have always taken for granted that she had herself composed, a poem which had a romantic place in my early mental history.  It ran thus, I think: 

  O pretty Moon, you shine so bright! 
  I’ll go to bid Mamma good-night,
  And then I’ll lie upon my bed
  And watch you move above my head.

  Ah! there, a cloud has hidden you! 
  But I can see your light shine thro’;
  It tries to hide you—­quite in vain,
  For—­there you quickly come again!

  It’s God, I know, that makes you shine
  Upon this little bed of mine;
  But I shall all about you know
  When I can read and older grow.

Long, long after the last line had become an anachronism, I used to shout this poem from my bed before I went to sleep, whether the night happened to be moonlit or no.