Among other visitors that winter, I well remember Mr. John Morley--now Lord Morley--as he was told off for me to entertain during the day. He was a very brilliant young man, and my elders explained to me that his tense intellect kept them at too great a strain for pleasurable conversation. "You, dear Katie, don't matter, as no one expects you to know anything!" remarked my sister with cheerful kindness. So I calmly invited John Morley to walk with me, and, as we paced through the park from one lodge to the other, my companion talked to me so easily and readily that I forgot my rôle of "fool of the family," and responded most intelligently to a really very interesting conversation. With the ready tact of the really clever, he could already {17} adapt himself to great or small, and finding me simply ready to be interested, was most interesting, and I returned to my family happily conscious that I could now afford to ignore my brother Evelyn's advice to "look lovely and keep your mouth shut!" John Morley, so far as I remember him then, was a very slight young man with a hard, keen face, the features strongly marked, and fair hair. He had (to me) a kindly manner, and did not consider it beneath him to talk seriously to a girl so young in knowledge, so excessively and shyly conscious of his superiority, and so much awed by my mission of keeping him amused and interested while my elders rested from his somewhat oppressive intellectuality. I remember wondering, in some alarm, as to what topic I should start if he suddenly stopped talking. But my fear was entirely groundless; he passed so easily from one thing interesting to me to another that I forgot to be self-conscious, and we discussed horses and dogs, books and their writers--agreeing that authors were, of all men, the most disappointing in appearance--my father, soldiers, and "going to London," with the greatest pleasure and mutual self-confidence. And I think that, after that enlightening talk, had I been told that in after years this suave, clever young man was to become--as Gladstone's lieutenant--one of my bitterest foes, I should perhaps have been interested, but utterly unalarmed, for I had in this little episode lost all awe of cleverness as such. My father died in February, 1866. The vexed question of ways and means--always a vexed question in a clergyman's household when the head of the house dies--pressed heavily on my mother, who was left almost penniless by my father's death. My mother and sisters were discussing what was best {18} to be done, and my mother was speaking sadly as I went into her room. "We must sell the cow, and, of course, the pig," my eldest sister (Emma) replied in her sweet, cheerful voice, which produced a little laugh, though a rather dismal one, and our sorrow was chased away for the moment.