On Sundays we walked to the cathedral, and this was a day with a delight of its own for me.  He was never away on the Sunday.  Both of us attired in our best, we walked along the streets hand in hand; my father led me before the cathedral monuments, talking in a low tone of British victories, and commending the heroes to my undivided attention.  I understood very early that it was my duty to imitate them.  While we remained in the cathedral he talked of glory and Old England, and dropped his voice in the middle of a murmured chant to introduce Nelson’s name or some other great man’s and this recurred regularly.  ’What are we for now?’ he would ask me as we left our house.  I had to decide whether we took a hero or an author, which I soon learnt to do with capricious resolution.  We were one Sunday for Shakespeare; another for Nelson or Pitt.  ‘Nelson, papa,’ was my most frequent rejoinder, and he never dissented, but turned his steps toward Nelson’s cathedral dome, and uncovered his head there, and said:  ‘Nelson, then, to-day’; and we went straight to his monument to perform the act of homage.  I chose Nelson 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learn the grounds for my disregard of their claims, and they urged him to intercede with me, and imparted many of their unpublished adventures, so that I should be tempted to give them a chance on the following Sunday.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