Whatever the weather, we invariably walked home from Drury Lane to South Audley Street, a long trudge for young feet, as my mother had scruples about using the carriages on Sundays.

Neither my father nor my mother ever dined out on a Sunday, nor did they invite people to dinner on that day, for they wished as far as possible to give those in their employment a day of rest.  All quite hopelessly Victorian! for, after all, why should people ever think of anybody but themselves?

Dr. Cumming was a great bee-fancier, and a recognised authority on bees.  Calling one day on my mother, he brought with him four queen-bees of a new breed, each one encased in a little paper bag.  He prided himself on his skill in handling bees, and proudly exhibited those treasures to my mother.  He replaced them in their paper bags, and being a very absent-minded man, he slipped the bags into the tail pocket of his clerical frock-coat.  Soon after he began one of his long arguments (probably fixing the exact date of the end of the world), and, totally oblivious of the presence of the bees in his tail pocket, he leant against the mantelpiece.  The queen-bees, naturally resenting the pressure, stung him through the cloth on that portion of his anatomy immediately nearest to their temporary prison.  Dr. Cumming yelled with pain, and began skipping all round the room.  It so tickled my fancy to see the grim and austere minister, who towered above me in the pulpit every Sunday, executing a sort of solo-Jazz dance up and down the big room, punctuated with loud cries, that I rolled about on the floor with laughter.

The London of the “sixties” was a very dark and dingy place.  The streets were sparingly lit with the dimmest of gas-jets set very far apart:  the shop-windows made no display of lights, and the general effect was one of intense gloom.

Until I was seven years old, I had never left the United Kingdom.  We then all went to Paris for a fortnight, on our way to the Riviera.  I well remember leaving London at 7 a.m. on a January morning, in the densest of fogs.  So thick was the fog that the footman had to lead the horses all the way to Charing Cross Station.  Ten hours later I found myself in a fairy city of clean white stone houses, literally blazing with light.  I had never imagined such a beautiful, attractive place, and indeed the contrast between the dismal London of the “sixties” and this brilliant, glittering town was unbelievable.  Paris certainly deserved the title of “La Ville Lumiere” in a literal sense.  I like the French expression, “une ville ruisselante de lumiere,” “a city dripping with light.”  That is an apt description of the Paris of the Second Empire, for it was hardly a manufacturing city then, and the great rim of outlying factories that now besmirch the white stone of its house fronts had not come into existence, the atmosphere being as clear as in the country.  A naturally retentive memory is apt to store up perfectly useless items of information.