in preference to the others because near bed-time in the evening my father told me stories of our hero of the day, and neither Pitt nor Shakespeare lost an eye, or an arm, or fought with a huge white bear on the ice to make himself interesting.  I named them occasionally out of compassion, and to please my father, who said that they ought to have a turn.  They were, he told me, in the habit of paying him a visit, whenever I had particularly neglected them, to learn the grounds for my disregard of their claims, and they urged him to intercede with me, and imparted many of their unpublished adventures, so that I should be tempted to give them a chance on the following Sunday.

‘Great Will,’ my father called Shakespeare, and ‘Slender Billy,’ Pitt.  The scene where Great Will killed the deer, dragging Falstaff all over the park after it by the light of Bardolph’s nose, upon which they put an extinguisher if they heard any of the keepers, and so left everybody groping about and catching the wrong person, was the most wonderful mixture of fun and tears.  Great Will was extremely youthful, but everybody in the park called him, ‘Father William’; and when he wanted to know which way the deer had gone, King Lear (or else my memory deceives me) punned, and Lady Macbeth waved a handkerchief for it to be steeped in the blood of the deer; Shylock ordered one pound of the carcase; Hamlet (the fact was impressed on me) offered him a three-legged stool; and a number of kings and knights and ladies lit their torches from Bardolph; and away they flew, distracting the keepers and leaving Will and his troop to the deer.  That poor thing died from a different weapon at each recital, though always with a flow of blood and a successful dash of his antlers into Falstaff; and to hear Falstaff bellow!  But it was mournful to hear how sorry Great Will was over the animal he had slain.  He spoke like music.  I found it pathetic in spite of my knowing that the whole scene was lighted up by Bardolph’s nose.  When I was just bursting out crying—­for the deer’s tongue was lolling out and quick pantings were at his side; he had little ones at home—­Great Will remembered his engagement to sell Shylock a pound of the carcase; determined that no Jew should eat of it, he bethought him that Falstaff could well spare a pound, and he said the Jew would not see the difference:  Falstaff only got off by hard running and roaring out that he knew his unclean life would make him taste like pork and thus let the Jew into the trick.

My father related all this with such a veritable matter-of-fact air, and such liveliness—­he sounded the chase and its cries, and showed King Lear tottering, and Hamlet standing dark, and the vast substance of Falstaff—­ that I followed the incidents excitedly, and really saw them, which was better than understanding them.  I required some help from him to see that Hamlet’s offer of a three-legged stool at a feverish moment of the chase, was laughable.  He taught me what to think of it by pitching Great Will’s voice high, and Hamlet’s very low.  By degrees I got some unconscious knowledge of the characters of Shakespeare.