y as well here inform the reader that I was born at the end of
September 1871, and was christened John, after my grandfather. From what
I have said above he will readily believe that my earliest experiences
were somewhat squalid. Memories of childhood rush vividly upon me when I
pass through a low London alley, and catch the faint sickly smell that
pervades it--half paraffin, half black-currants, but wholly something
very different. I have a fancy that we lived in Blackmoor Street, off
Drury Lane. My father, when first I knew of his doing anything at all,
supported my mother and myself by drawing pictures with coloured chalks
upon the pavement; I used sometimes to watch him, and marvel at the skill
with which he represented fogs, floods, and fires. These three "f's," he
would say, were his three best friends, for they were easy to do and
brought in halfpence freely. The return of the dove to the ark was his
favourite subject. Such a little ark, on such a hazy morning, and such a
little pigeon--the rest of the picture being cheap sky, and still cheaper
sea; nothing, I have often heard him say, was more popular than this with
his clients. He held it to be his masterpiece, but would add with some
naivete that he considered himself a public benefactor for carrying it
out in such perishable fashion. "At any rate," he would say, "no one can
bequeath one of my many replicas to the nation."

I never learned how much my father earned by his profession, but it must
have been something considerable, for we always had enough to eat and
drink; I imagine that he did better than many a struggling artist with
more ambitious aims. He was strictly temperate during all the time that
I knew anything about him, but he was not a teetotaler; I never saw any
of the fits of nervous excitement which in his earlier years had done so
much to wreck him. In the evenings, and on days when the state of the
pavement did not permit him to work, he took great pains with my
education, which he could very well do, for as a boy he had been in the
sixth form of one of our foremost public schools. I found him a patient,
kindly instructor, while to my mother he was a model husband. Whatever
others may have said about him, I can never think of him without very
affectionate respect.

Things went on quietly enough, as above indicated, till I was about
fourteen, when by a freak of fortune my father became suddenly affluent.
A brother of his father's h