ily had
a house there in one of the then fashionable squares. The family was
absent, but the house was open, and my friend proposed that we should
sleep there and make a night of it. We accordingly telegraphed to Mr.
Philpot that we should be back next day by breakfast time, and arranged
to dine early, and spend the evening at the play. As we walked to the
theater we found the shops still open, and we paused to look for a
moment at the windows of Treacher's Library. In a long row of volumes I
saw one bound in green. Its gilt lettering glittered, and the gaslight
revealed to me the reissued poems of Swinburne. I went in and bought it
and entered the dress circle hugging this priceless treasure. The play,
I believe, had something to do with racing, but I hardly looked at the
stage. My eyes and attention were magnetized by the green object on my
knee. I occasionally peeped at its pages; but the light, while the play
was in progress, was too dim to render the print legible. Between the
acts, however, I began to decipher stanzas such as the following, and
notes new to the world invaded my ears like magic:

The sea gives her shells to the shingle,
The earth gives her streams to the sea,

or again:

As the waves of the ebb drawing seaward
When their hollows are full of the night.

When had words, I asked myself, ever made music such as this? I felt by
the time I got back to my friend's door that:

I on honeydew had fed,
And drunk the milk of paradise.

This magic still remained with me when, my days at Littlehampton being
ended, I went at length to Oxford. But meanwhile to my conditions at
home a new element was added, by which the scope of my experiences was
at once greatly enlarged.

I have mentioned already that, during the first sixty years of the
growth of Torquay, the owners of Cockington had preserved their rural
seclusion intact, having refused, during that long period, to permit the
erection of more than two villas on their property. But somewhere about
the year 1860 a solitary exception was made in favor of Mr. William
Froude, my mother's eldest brother, to whom, by my paternal uncle, a
lease was granted of a certain number of acres on the summit of what was
then a wooded and absolutely rural hill. Here he erected a house of
relatively considerable size, from which, as a distant spectacle,
Torquay was visible beyond a tract of intervening treetops. It was
nearing completion at