int out that the system on which I was being
educated deprived all things, human life among the rest, of their
mystery. The 'bare-grinning skeleton of death' was to me merely a
prepared specimen of that featherless plantigrade vertebrate,
'homo sapiens'.

As I have said that this anecdote was thought worth repeating, I
ought to proceed to say that there was, so far as I can
recollect, none of that flattery of childhood which is so often
merely a backhanded way of indulging the vanity of parents. My
Mother, indeed, would hardly have been human if she had not
occasionally entertained herself with the delusion that her
solitary duckling was a cygnet. This my Father did not encourage,
remarking, with great affection, and chucking me under the chin,
that I was 'a nice little ordinary boy'. My Mother, stung by this
want of appreciation, would proceed so far as to declare that she
believed that in future times the F.R.S. would be chiefly known
as his son's father! (This is a pleasantry frequent in
professional families.)

To this my Father, whether convinced or not, would make no demur,
and the couple would begin to discuss, in my presence, the
direction which my shining talents would take. In consequence of
my dedication to 'the Lord's Service', the range of possibilities
was much restricted. My Father, who had lived long in the
Tropics, and who nursed a perpetual nostalgia for 'the little
lazy isles where the trumpet-orchids blow', leaned towards the
field of missionary labour. My Mother, who was cold about foreign
missions, preferred to believe that I should be the Charles
Wesley of my age, 'or perhaps', she had the candour to admit,
'merely the George Whitefield'. I cannot recollect the time when
I did not understand that I was going to be a minister of the
Gospel.

It is so generally taken for granted that a life strictly
dedicated to religion is stiff and dreary, that I may have some
difficulty in persuading my readers that, as a matter of fact, in
these early days of my childhood, before disease and death had
penetrated to our slender society, we were always cheerful and
often gay. My parents were playful with one another, and there
were certain stock family jests which seldom failed to enliven
the breakfast table. My Father and Mother lived so completely in
the atmosphere of faith, and were so utterly convinced of their
intercourse with God, that, so long as that intercourse was not
clouded by sin, to which they