as in this early period is
curiously vague. It would seem that he produced no very clear
impression on my mind then. Our meetings were not very frequent, I
think. As I chiefly recall them, they occurred in the wide but rather
dark entrance hall, and were accompanied by conversation confined to
Amelia and my father. At such times he would be engaged in polishing
his hat, sometimes with a velvet pad, and sometimes on his
coat-sleeve. I used to hear from him remarks like these:

'Well, keep him out of doors as much as possible, so long as it
doesn't rain. Eh? Oh, well, you'd better buy another. How much will it
be? I will send up word if I am back before the boy's bed-time.'

And then he might turn to me, after putting on his hat, and absently
pull one of my ears, or stroke my nose or forehead. His hands were
very slender, warm, and pleasantly odorous of soap and tobacco. 'Be a
good man,' he would say. And there the interview ended. He never said:
'Be a good child'; always 'a good man'; and sometimes he would repeat
it, in a gravely preoccupied way.

Once, and, so far as I remember, only once, we met him out-of-doors;
in the park, it was, and he took us both to the Zoological Gardens,
and gave us tea there. (Yellowish cake with white sugar icing over it
has ever since suggested to me the pungent smell of monkey-houses and
lions' cages.) The meeting was purely accidental, I believe.

It must have been in about my ninth year, I fancy, that I began really
to know something of my father, as a man, rather than as a sort of
supernatural, hat-polishing, He-who-must-be-obeyed. We had a small
house of our own then, in Putney; and the occasion of our first coming
together as fellow-humans was a shared walk across Wimbledon Common,
and into Richmond Park by the Robin Hood Gate. The period was the
'sixties of last century, and I had just begun my attendance each day
at a local 'Academy for the Sons of Gentlemen.' To us, in the Academy,
my father descended as from Olympus, while the afternoon was yet
young, and carried me off before the envious eyes of my fellow
sufferers and what I felt to be the grudging gaze of the usher, who
had already twice since dinner-time severely pulled my ears, because
of some confusion that existed in my mind between Alfred and his burnt
cakes and Canute and his wet feet. (As I understood it, Canute sat on
the beach upon one of those minute camp-stools which mothers and
nurses used at the seaside before