At the age of eighteen my mother was sent to England as companion to a lonely old woman who had befriended my grandmother when she was an orphan. For seventeen years she waited hand and foot on this old lady, who for the last few years was perfectly senile. When she finally died, my mother determined to go to India, after a short training as a medical missionary. This ambition was baulked by her meeting my father, a widower with five children; it was plain to her that she could do as good work on the home-mission field. About the other side of my family. The Graves’ have a pedigree that dates back to the Conquest, but is good as far as the reign of Henry VII. Colonel Graves, the regicide, who was Ireton’s chief of horse, is claimed as the founder of the Irish branch of the family. Limerick was its centre. There were occasional soldiers and doctors in it, but they were collaterals; in the direct male line was a sequence of rectors, deans, and bishops. The Limerick Graves’ have no ‘hands’ or mechanical sense; instead they have a wide reputation as conversationalists. In those of my relatives who have the family characteristics most strongly marked, unnecessary talk is a nervous disorder. Not bad talk as talk goes; usually informative, often witty, but it goes on and on and on and on and on. The von Ranke’s have, I think, little mechanical aptitude either. It is most inconvenient to have been born into the age of the internal-combustion engine and the electric dynamo and to have no sympathy with them; a push bicycle, a primus stove, and an army rifle mark the bounds of my mechanical capacity. My grandfather, on this side, was Protestant Bishop of Limerick. He had eight, or was it ten, children. He was a little man and a remarkable mathematician; he first formulated some theory or other of spherical conics. He was also an antiquary, and discovered the key to ancient Irish Ogham script. He was hard and, by reputation, far from generous. A gentleman and a scholar, and respected throughout the countryside on that account. He and the Catholic Bishop were on the very best terms. They cracked Latin jokes at each other, discussed fine points of scholarship, and were unclerical enough not to take their religious differences too seriously. When I was in Limerick as a soldier of the garrison some twenty-five years after my grandfather’s death, I heard a lot about Bishop Graves from the townsfolk. The Catholic Bishop had once joked him about the size of his family, and my grandfather had retorted warmly with the text about the blessedness of the man who has his quiver full of arrows, to which the Catholic answered briefly and severely: ‘The ancient Jewish quiver only held six.’ My grandfather’s wake, they said, was the longest ever seen in the town of Limerick; it stretched from the cathedral right down O’Connell Street and over Sarsfield Bridge, and I do not know how many miles Irish beyond. He blessed me when I was a child, but I do not remember that.