As children we were fully conscious of this side of his character. We felt our little hypocrisies shrivel up before him; we felt a confidence in the infallible rectitude of his moral judgments which inspired a kind of awe. His arbitrament was instant and final, though rarely invoked, and was perhaps the more tremendous in proportion to its rarity. This aspect, as if of an oracle without appeal, was heightened in our minds by the fact that we saw but little of him. This was one of the penalties of his hard-driven existence. In the struggle to keep his head above water for the first fifteen or twenty years of his married life, he had scarcely any time to devote to his children. The "lodger," as he used to call himself at one time, who went out early and came back late, could sometimes spare half an hour just before or after dinner to draw wonderful pictures for the little ones, and these were memorable occasions. I remember that he used to profess a horror of being too closely watched, or of receiving suggestions, while he drew. "Take care, take care," he would exclaim, "or I don't know what it will turn into." When I was seven years old I had the misfortune to be laid up with scarlet fever, and then his gift of drawing was a great solace to me. The solitary days--for I was the first victim in the family--were very long, and I looked forward with intense interest to one half-hour after dinner, when he would come up and draw scenes from the history of a remarkable bull-terrier and his family that went to the seaside, in a most human and child-delighting manner. I have seldom suffered a greater disappointment than when, one evening, I fell asleep just before this fairy half-hour, and lost it out of my life. In those days he often used to take the three eldest of us out for a walk on Sunday afternoons, sometimes to the Zoological Gardens, more often to the lanes and fields between St. John's Wood and Hampstead or West End. For then the flood of bricks and mortar ceased on the Finchley Road just beyond the Swiss Cottage, and the West End Lane, winding solitary between its high hedges and rural ditches, was quite like a country road in holiday time, and was sometimes gladdened in June with real dog-roses, although the church and a few houses had already begun to encroach on the open fields at the end of the Abbey Road. My father often used to delight us with sea stories and tales of animals, and occasionally with geological sketches suggested by the gravels of Hampstead Heath. But regular "shop" he would not talk to us, contrary to the expectation of people who have often asked me whether we did not receive quite a scientific training from his companionship. At the Christmas dinner he invariably delighted the children by carving wonderful beasts, generally pigs, out of orange peel. When the marriage of his eldest daughter had taken her away from this important function, she was sent the best specimen as a reminder.]