Father was at this time producing numerous water-colour drawings
of minute and even of microscopic forms of life. These he
executed in the manner of miniature, with an amazing fidelity of
form and with a brilliancy of colour which remains unfaded after
fifty years. By far the most costly of his pigments was the
intense crimson which is manufactured out of the very spirit and,
essence of cochineal. I had lately become a fervent imitator of
his works of art, and I was allowed to use all of his colours,
except one; I was strictly forbidden to let a hair of my paint-
brush touch the little broken mass of carmine which was all that
he possessed. We believed, but I do not know whether this could
be the fact, that carmine of this superlative quality was sold at
a guinea a cake. 'Carmine', therefore, became my shibboleth of
self-indulgence; it was a symbol of all that taste and art and
wealth could combine to produce. I imagined, for instance, that
at Belshazzar's feast, the loftiest epergne of gold, surrounded
by flowers and jewels, carried the monarch's proudest possession,
a cake of carmine. I knew of no object in the world of luxury
more desirable than this, and its obsession in my waking hours is
quite enough, I think, to account for 'carmine' having been the
torment of my dreams.

The little incident of the beetle displays my Father's mood at
this period in its worst light. His severity was not very
creditable, perhaps, to his good sense, but without a word of
explanation it may seem even more unreasonable than it was. My
Father might have been less stern to my lapses from high conduct,
and my own mind at the same time less armoured against his
arrows, if our relations had been those which exist in an
ordinary religious family. He would have been more indulgent, and
my own affections might nevertheless have been more easily
alienated, if I had been treated by him as a commonplace child,
standing as yet outside the pale of conscious Christianity. But
he had formed the idea, and cultivated it assiduously, that I was
an _ame d'elite_, a being to whom the mysteries of salvation had
been divinely revealed and by whom they had been accepted. I was,
to his partial fancy, one in whom the Holy Ghost had already
performed a real and permanent work. Hence, I was inside the
pale; I had attained that inner position which divided, as we
used to say, the Sheep from the Goats. Another little boy might
be very well-behaved, but if he