child was growing
with an extraordinary rapidity. At a year he weighed as much as Hercules
had weighed when he was three. 'Ferdinando goes crescendo,' wrote
Filomena in her diary. 'It seems not natural.' At eighteen months the
baby was almost as tall as their smallest jockey, who was a man of
thirty-six. Could it be that Ferdinando was destined to become a man of
the normal, gigantic dimensions? It was a thought to which neither of
his parents dared yet give open utterance, but in the secrecy of their
respective diaries they brooded over it in terror and dismay.

"On his third birthday Ferdinando was taller than his mother and not
more than a couple of inches short of his father's height. 'To-day for
the first time' wrote Sir Hercules, 'we discussed the situation. The
hideous truth can be concealed no longer: Ferdinando is not one of us.
On this, his third birthday, a day when we should have been rejoicing at
the health, the strength, and beauty of our child, we wept together over
the ruin of our happiness. God give us strength to bear this cross.'

"At the age of eight Ferdinando was so large and so exuberantly healthy
that his parents decided, though reluctantly, to send him to school.
He was packed off to Eton at the beginning of the next half. A profound
peace settled upon the house. Ferdinando returned for the summer
holidays larger and stronger than ever. One day he knocked down the
butler and broke his arm. 'He is rough, inconsiderate, unamenable to
persuasion,' wrote his father. 'The only thing that will teach him
manners is corporal chastisement.' Ferdinando, who at this age was
already seventeen inches taller than his father, received no corporal
chastisement.

"One summer holidays about three years later Ferdinando returned to
Crome accompanied by a very large mastiff dog. He had bought it from an
old man at Windsor who had found the beast too expensive to feed. It
was a savage, unreliable animal; hardly had it entered the house when it
attacked one of Sir Hercules's favourite pugs, seizing the creature in
its jaws and shaking it till it was nearly dead. Extremely put out by
this occurrence, Sir Hercules ordered that the beast should be chained
up in the stable-yard. Ferdinando sullenly answered that the dog was
his, and he would keep it where he pleased. His father, growing angry,
bade him take the animal out of the house at once, on pain of his utmost
displeasure. Ferdinando refused to move. His mother at