but at an impressionable age was swept along by Newman and the Tractarian movement, and when I remember him was a full-fledged Roman ecclesiastic looking the part to the life. Later he became a Monsignor and is now a Bishop in partibus in the confidence of the Vatican. Such was the very much alive and progressive family with a mania for doing things, an admiration of Jowett, and an eye to the main chance, from which my mother emerged at a very early age to marry my father, himself barely out of the undergraduate stage. The seething Stanley impetus survived in my strenuous education and over the Nottingham Election, but then subsided into a degree of peacefulness alien to the family tradition.

Let us glance for a moment at the environment of the other parent. My grandfather was Lord John Russell, twice Prime Minister, who died as Earl Russell. His first wife was a widow, Lady Ribblesdale, with children of her own. By her he had two children, Lady Georgiana and Lady Victoria, my half-aunts. The first married a very uninteresting hunting squire, and is still living in Hampton Court Palace at the age of 83, having lately published a book of her reminiscences. The second married Montagu Villiers who had a cure of souls at Adisham in Kent, and subsequently became well known in London as the High Church Vicar of St. Paul's, Knightsbridge. After Lady Ribblesdale's death my grandfather married Frances Maria Elliot, daughter of the Earl of Minto, my grandmother, better known to her political contemporaries as Lady John. The eldest son, John Russell, afterwards Viscount Amberley, was my father. There was another son, Willy, whom I dimly remember when I was eleven. The only daughter, Mary Agatha, lived with her mother till her death, and therefore resembled my aunt Maude Stanley, in remaining unmarried. The other son, Rollo, lived at home at Pembroke Lodge during the greater part of my youth, but ultimately married a very pretty woman who died after her first child. He then married a Miss Joachim, a woman of severe aspect who survived him: she was a relative of the violinist. The general atmosphere of P. L. (as Pembroke Lodge was always called in the family) is a subject of which I shall have a good deal to say later when I had the misfortune to be exposed to its full force. For our present purposes I may sum up by saying that it was timid, shrinking, that of a snail withdrawing into its shell, full of high principle and religious feeling of the same kind that surrounded Queen Victoria (quite genuine I believe in the case of my grandmother). At every point it recoiled as the

young ladies with the vapours who swooned in Victorian novels used to do from the touch of real life and anything so vulgar as facts. Religion might occasionally be spoken of with bated breath and in a hushed curate sort of voice, but sex, birth, swearing, trade, money, passion, were subjects I never heard mentioned. Nothing could have been more complete than the contrast with the Stanley atmosphere and I imagine that the relations between the two families were chiefly political. How my mother ever found the necessary courage to face it I cannot think, but no doubt she discovered in my father a passionate idealism coupled with a pathetic helplessness which aroused both romantic love and that maternal passion which exists in every woman worth the name. Certain it is that so far as my observations went they were absolutely devoted to each other spiritually, mentally and physically, and acted and reacted upon one another with the happiest results. They were married on 8 November, 1864, and I was born on 12 August, 1865, in strict accordance with the best English traditions of family duty.

Well even now I have not really said anything about my parents, but only described the environment from which they came. My father was pure Russell, short, black hair, not very strong, not very good sight; artistic, and deeply religious. Family resemblances are curious things: my brother at thirty was the image of my father as I remember him: I have been told over and over again that I am the image of my grandmother Stanley, and of my uncle Lyulph at my age, and yet I have a photograph taken at the age of twenty in Salt Lake City which anyone who knows him would swear was Bertie. My father went to school at Harrow, when Dr. Butler was headmaster; I have read his journals-they ooze religion, but are undoubtedly genuine in their expressions of feeling. He then went to Cambridge, and there began his life-long friendship with Sanderson. I doubt if he enjoyed his school life. I don't think at any time of his life he quite got over the P. L. manner, the combination of shrinking and assertiveness, due to nervous self-consciousness, and a lack of the Stanley thick skin. I cannot remember how fond I was of him so I suppose I must have been much fonder of my mother, for in her case I remember it passionately to this day. I think he was sometimes morose but that she could always cheer him up. Apart from early and agreeable memories I remember him chiefly as occupied with the book he was writing, "The Analysis of Religious Belief." I remember

some months were passed in London in Weymouth Street, when he was studying Hebrew and I remember him at work writing and reading in the study at Ravenscroft. My mother on the other hand was always active, sane and normal, keeping her household in order, keeping her husband cheerful and up to the mark, and looking after and teaching her children. I have a vivid recollection of her early morning visit to the store cupboard with Lizzie Williams to give out the stores for the day. Although she did not write she had great outside activities of her own, was an intimate friend of John Stuart Mill, an early pioneer of Woman's Rights, in touch with Mrs. Wolstenholme Elmy, and occasionally spoke at meetings. Incidentally also cheering up Sanderson and preventing him making love to her. I do not know when or how they both lost their belief in revealed religion but certainly at eight when I was old enough to remember, they were both agnostics, and I do not remember ever being taken to church or having the name of God inflicted upon me.

I

CHAPTER II

EARLY RECREATIONS

HAVE already mentioned the assistance I gave or supposed myself

to give my father and mother in the clearing of the little square garden outside the drawing-room windows, in the construction of the great circular rockery, and in the building of the log-hut. By way of exercise I used to take walks with my governess, to wheel my sister about in a wheelbarrow, or to drive her about in a little goat carriage in which we went sailing gaily about the country roads quite unchaperoned and quite unprotected. My parents must have had great courage and confidence to allow this, and judging from my own feelings these days as to what small boys. are likely to do, I cannot help thinking that my mother must have been very glad each time we returned safely. Later I had a pony which was called Fenella, and I remember that I used to ride her bareback. I have a distinct recollection of setting out for a ride one day on my bareback pony in a snowstorm clothed literally only in a shirt and a pair of trousers, for one of the things I was encouraged to do was to run about barefoot. Although I remember having chilblains occasionally I ascribe to this early training the excellent circulation of my feet which prevents them from ever being cold, their natural shape which makes my dealings with a bootmaker difficult, and my freedom from the various ailments of the foot from which other people seem to suffer, the flexibility of my muscles and the sure-footedness which results from it. I also have a vivid recollection of another ride on my pony which was less pleasant, for in swinging too fast round the corner into the stables I shot off his back and brought up my poor little head against the stone wall. I was carried screaming into the house by Williams, whom I have mentioned before, but I do not think the effects were serious. One of my regular duties was to take the letters in to the post at Trelleck every afternoon on my pony. The Post Office was kept by the grocer who also sold treacle, and I well remember my vivid interest in his bags with puzzle pic

tures upon them in which you had to find the donkey, find the dog, or find the horse. I do not know if these diverting things still survive in the country, but at that age the excitement and triumph of success in solving the puzzle were very great.

I was very fond of animals but I do not think I had a dog of my own at Ravenscroft. There were however two dogs; a white Spitz of my mother's called Argus which used to accompany us on our walks, and which had the extraordinary and unusual accomplishment of picking ripe bilberries off the bilberry bushes and eating them. There was also a large black dog called Bosun, probably a mongrel retriever, a good bit larger than myself, with which I was on the friendliest terms. I had, however, from time to time cats of my own, always called Mischa, and I recollect more than one tragedy. On one occasion I was proudly wheeling a wheelbarrow in which some large stones had been left and in which I had put three of the current kittens, when the wheel struck a root or something, and the barrow overturned and one of the kittens was crushed to death between two stones. On another occasion I had put a collar and a piece of string on my favourite cat, and, as is the way of all cats, it suddenly rushed out. I discovered it three days later hanging dead by the neck from a laurel bush. I think few people realize how desolating tragedies of this sort are to the young to whom they appear so final. Since that day I have sometimes put a collar with bells on it on a cat to save the birds in the garden from being eaten, but I have always been careful to see that it is weak enough to break with any strong effort: this sometimes comes expensive in collars. My love for dogs and cats has never changed, and at this date I am surrounded and loved by two absolutely perfect little Maltese terriers who understand everything, and a beautiful and devoted cat-all four of us being on the best of terms with each other. Indeed the cat comes running when it hears my motor horn, and goes for long walks with the dogs and me in the country.

Another task in which I remember helping my father was in connexion with a larch plantation of some forty acres close to the house through which he made an avenue bordered with spruce. I had to cut these down the other day as the rocky soil no longer gave them sufficient foothold to stand against the wind, but I well remember their planting half a century ago.

I have no recollection of ever receiving any early lessons in mechanics, nor can I think that any member of my ancestry inspired