the time when I was first under Mr. Philpot's
care. My father, being a complete recluse, and my kindred, whether at
Cockington Court or otherwise, confining their intimacies to hereditary
friends and connections, I found few fresh excitements at their houses
or his beyond such as I could spin for myself, like a spider, out of my
own entrails. It was, therefore, for me a very agreeable circumstance
that presently in Chelston Cross, while I was still under Mr. Philpot's
care, I was provided with a second home during a large part of my
holidays, and subsequently of my Oxford vacations, where the stir of the
outer world was very much more in evidence.

Distinguished as a man of science, a mathematician, and a classical
scholar, Mr. Froude possessed the most fascinating manners imaginable.
His wife, the daughter of an old-world Devonshire notable who once owned
the borough of Dartmouth, returning two members for it, he himself being
always one, was a woman of remarkable intellect, of a singularly genial
shrewdness, and of manners attractive to every one with whom she might
come in contact. Indeed, no two persons could have been more happily
qualified than Mr. and Mrs. William Froude, together with their daughter
(subsequently Baroness A. von Hugel), to render their house a center of
interesting and intellectual society, and their circle of friends was
widened by two adventitious circumstances. Mrs. Froude, under the
influence of Newman, who was her frequent and intimate correspondent,
had entered the Catholic Church, her children following her example, and
the freemasonry of a common faith resulted in closely connecting her and
hers with various old Catholic families and many distinguished
converts; while Mr. Froude, at the time to which I now refer, was
becoming, through his indulgence in purely accidental taste, a figure in
the world of national, and even of international, affairs.

His favorite recreation was yachting, and one of his possessions was a
sailing yacht. He was thus, as a man of alert observation, led to pay
special attention to the relation of a vessel's lines to its behavior
under different conditions in respect of its stability and speed, and
the project occurred to him of testing his rough conclusions by means of
miniature models, these being placed in some small body of water and
then submitted to systematic experiments. Accordingly, soon after he had
settled himself at Chelston Cross, he proceeded to lea