This result was accentuated by the stories told in my hearing of another personage well known to my family likewise, to which I listened with a yet keener appreciation. Bishop Philpotts--for it is of him I speak--holding till the day of his death a "golden stall" at Durham, the emoluments of which amounted to L5,000 a year, interested me rather as a lay magnate than as a clerical. Among the many villas then rising at Torquay the Bishop built one of the largest. This agreeable residence, in the designing of which he was helped by my father, and which overlooked extensive glades and lawns sloping down toward the sea, enabled him to enjoy a society more entertaining than that of his own cathedral close; and the anecdotes current in my family as to his ways and his mundane hospitalities were as familiar to me as those of any character in the novels of Miss Austen--a writer whose social discrimination delighted and appealed to me before I was ten years old. The Bishop was renowned for his suave and courtly manners, his charming voice, and the subtle precision of its modulations; and the following stories of him are still fresh in my memory. At one of his luncheon parties he was specially kind to a country clergyman's wife, who knew none of the company, and he took her out on a terrace in order to show her the view--a view of the sea shut in by the crags of a small cove. "Ah, my lord," gasped the lady, "it reminds one so much of Switzerland." "Precisely," said the Bishop, "except that there we have the mountains without the sea, and here we have the sea without the mountains." He was somewhat less urbane to an ultra-fashionable lady, his neighbor, who had developed a habit, in his opinion objectionable, of exhibiting his views to her visitors by way of passing the morning. This lady, with a bevy of satellites, having appeared one day in his drawing room about the hour of noon, the Bishop, with the utmost graciousness, took them into a conservatory, showed them some of his plants and then, opening a door, invited them to go outside. As soon as they were in the outer air, he himself retreated, saying, as he closed the door, "We lunch at one." On another occasion at a dinner party a shy young lady was present, whose mother, with maternal partiality, admitted that her daughter sang. After dinner the Bishop had candles placed on the piano, and begged the shrinking vocalist to give them an exhibition of her skill. The luckless victim protested that she could not sing at all, but presently, despite her objections, she was blushing on the fatal music stool, and was faltering out a desperate something which was at all events intended to be a song. "Thank you," said the Bishop, benignly, as soon as the performance was ended. "The next time you tell us you cannot sing we shall know how to believe you."