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a very vivid recollection of watching the vans from Rodborough coming to the front door and unloading their furniture. Ravenscroft was an isolated house on the high ground above Tintern, three miles away, and one mile from the village of Trelleck. Rather small and narrow I thought the rooms when I revisited it in later years, but at that age I had no such feeling. It had been bought for £5,000, and the Duke of Beaufort's woods extended a long way at the back of the house. In 1874 there was a great fire in these woods, and I remember working with my father and dozens of other men to put it out. As the soil was peaty and caught light and smouldered, this was a very difficult job, and the fire lasted three days altogether. In front of the house was an open iron railing, and beyond that our meadow, bounded on the far side by a stone wall and a public road. Across the meadow and a plantation of some forty acres which also belonged to my father ran a public footpath from Trelleck to the top of Llandogo Falls. Along the front of the house ran a walk passing through a rockery and a very small bit of wood to a log summer-house from which one could obtain a not very good view of the Wye Valley between Llandogo and Tintern. When we first came there the place was very unfinished, and I helped my father, or thought I did, in making the little square garden in front of the drawing-room, the rockery, and I think the log-house. I think I must always have had an engineering kind of mind because, although I was only eleven when I left the place, for twenty years afterwards I could have drawn accurately every part of the house and every path and landmark in the grounds, and I think that even to-day, forty-five years afterwards, I could make a plan which would only be inaccurate in two or three very small details. Little did this young couple think when they came to their new house so full of enthusiasm, planning and carrying out their alterations, and looking forward to a life full of activity and interest, that in so few years both of them would die in it.

It might be well to describe the house in some detail. The front door had an extended outside porch over which I rather think my father later erected a small conservatory. You then entered a long and narrow hall, and immediately on your left a door opened into a small sitting-room. Half-way down was the principal staircase leading to the first floor with a small landing half up it. Just beyond the staircase was a door leading to the kitchen and back stairs. Half-way down the hall on the right a door led into a long narrow room of which one end was the dining-room and the other

end a sort of sitting-room where later I generally had my lessons. At the far end of the hall facing the front door were two doors, the left one going out by a small passage to the verandah, and off this passage opened my mother's store-room and what house agents euphemistically describe as the usual offices. The right-hand door led into a drawing-room set at right angles to the dining-room and opening by two French windows on to the verandah, and by a third on to the gravel walk at what I suppose might really be called the front of the house. On the first floor the room immediately above and corresponding to the drawing-room was my father's study; above the dining-room was the principal bedroom, in which I also slept for several years. Opening off this above the front door end of the hall was a bathroom, and over the little reception-room first described the day nursery, beyond which was the night nursery. The first floor had a largish landing from which you went up five or six steps to my father's study and on the left to a spare bedroom. Over the door which led from the hall to the kitchen was a corresponding door leading to a nurse's bedroom, and, later on, to a new room which they constructed for me as my bedroom and sittingroom with a separate staircase leading direct into the garden. The kitchen was of the old type, stone flagged, and had a big door which I think opened into the kitchen-garden. I do not seem to have any clear recollection of where the servants slept, perhaps because I never knew. A considerable stable with yard and coach-house adjoined the house, and was reached from the front door by going up about five stone steps and then through a little door in the wall of the stable yard. At the back of the stable and the kitchen was a large kitchen-garden, a place of great personal interest to me when fruit was ripe. It was not actually enclosed but surrounded by a hedge of laurel. On the house side of this hedge I remember three beehives. There were also wild bees which had a nest of their own under the roof above my father's study. For some days every summer there was a very curious fight between these two sets of bees; they used to fly about stinging each other in the air and the dead and dying used to fall in numbers on the gravel path.

I lived at Ravenscroft altogether from July, 1870, to 1876, that is, from the time I was five until I was eleven years old. I cannot at this distance of time very clearly sort out my recollections, but the majority of them relate to the time before my mother died in June, 1874. My sister Rachel belongs to this period, but I cannot truthfully say that I have very clear recollections of her

now. My Aunt Maude tells me that I was always very protective and devoted to her, and that the affection between us was very great. I have still a curious little photograph, taken in St. James's Park, of myself wheeling her in a toy wheelbarrow, and both of us dressed in astrakhan caps.

I was kept far more in touch with my parents than was common in those days, or even now, and I spent a very considerable part of the day with one or other of them. At the same time there were maids and, later, governesses whom I dimly recollect flitting across the scene. I believe some of them found me unmanageable, but I still seem to remember a German one and a Polish one of whom I was very fond. The most important member of the household was Mrs. Williams; her husband was the gardener, and I believe she had acted to some extent as my foster-mother at the time when I required these attentions. I imagine the couple had been with my parents from the date of their marriage, and, although both Welsh, they were always very devoted both to their employers and to the children. I remember very well the figure of old Williams, rather typically Welsh, with an untidy beard and a rather excitable manner. Mrs. Williams with great regularity produced numerous other children, all female, in addition to the one whose early death enabled her to afford me the necessary sustenance, but she always remained to me the devoted nurse of Greek tragedy. The two elder of the children, Kathleen and Polly, about one or two years younger than me respectively, are the only ones whom I remember at the time. In accordance with the democratic ideas of my parents they were permitted to play and go about with us on terms of complete equality. There was, at any rate in the earlier days, a groom, but I remember nothing about him. This was the simple and rather isolated household in which I grew up, and I recollect hardly any incursions from the outside world except Sandybobs as I used to call him, an old Cambridge friend of my father's, and devoted to my mother. Indeed from letters which he has recently thought fit to publish it appears that he had the good taste to be in love with her, a condition of things which I am sure never gave my father any cause for anxiety. However, I remember him as the cheery, active, gambolling friend of my young days, always very kind to me and always hailed with shouts of delight on his visits. At that time he was a comparatively briefless barrister he has since become better known to fame as a bookbinder and printer under the name of Cobden-Sanderson. Although, of course, at

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