Oh, the dear, dear feet, so plucky and untiring! And how I loved the "we" and the "our"! He always has identified himself with his men, so that they know that he cares for them, and they would follow him, as his colonel put it, "anywhere and into anything." And that day in his small childhood the little feet had a charm that for an instant brought quick hot tears into my eyes. He was very shy, though sometimes he could be very bold--as when one day, coming into the dining-room and finding a certain important person sitting there, he fetched on his own account a box of Vafiadis and, thrusting them under the visitor's eyes, said coolly: "'Ave a cigawette?" At other times nothing could induce him to go into a room where there was someone who was a stranger to him. His first experience of serious punishment came of this sensitiveness and shyness. A very well-known but decidedly ugly man was in the drawing-room, and the child, under pressure, went in to be seen of him. But when he caught sight of the visitor, his feelings overcame him. "Shunny man! Ugly man!" he cried; and he turned and bolted. And so sweet was that ugly man that he not only forgave him, but declared afterwards that it was the wretched little insulter's charm and beauty which had led him to think of marriage in the hope of having children of his own. But, as for me--I left the visitor to my husband's care, and, following the three-year-old sinner out of the room and upstairs to the nursery, whither he had fled, I administered personal chastisement. I soon found, however, that to punish him for social misbehaviour would not always be possible, because most of his naughtiness in this respect was due to nerves. It seemed to be a penalty attaching to his really unusual beauty that I should be unable to show it off. Many and many a time I took him to literary and artistic gatherings only to find myself obliged to send him home with his nurse before any exhibiting of him had been possible. The least excitement would throw him into such a fit of nerves as made even his grandmothers learn new wisdom about childhood. He was never gleeful. He had the sweetest, gladdest smile in the world, but there was always an underlying sadness in him that worried the many good people who imagine that if a child is happy it must needs be jumping about and laughing more or less noisily. And a great grief came to him at this time when his first nurse left to be married. Fond though he was of me, he was yet so unhappy over this that he was very nearly ill. How different children's characters are! His sister, The Bystander, then three months old, never cared who nursed her. Nurses might come and nurses might go, but as long as she was fed and bathed and looked after, she cared not a tinker's curse. And then there came two very important new-comers to the household--a black puppy, and the elderly woman who from then till now has been known as the Old Nurse.