But it must not be supposed, because I describe the downstairs rooms so fully, that these were my familiar haunts. We were strictly brought up in those days, and did not wander here and there, consorting freely with our elders, as the young people do nowadays. No, at eleven every morning I would be ruthlessly sent upstairs to change for my walk, nor was my presence tolerated for more than half an hour or three-quarters after luncheon: the real “children’s hour” was from half-past five in the evening until, at half-past seven, I went up to dress for dinner. At times other than these, I only had the liberty of one downstairs room, where it was felt that I could not get in the way—the great library where my father used to write his business letters. How I loved those hours in the library; how I have regretted that, as fortune would have it, none of my old childhood’s favourites were left to cheer me with their memories in later life! “Alice in Wonderland,” with the original Tenniel pictures, first editions of Beerbohm and Benson, books of travel that thrilled you with discoveries at the South Pole or on Mount Everest, histories of the Five Years’ War by men who had fought and lived through it, quaint old sheets like the _Tatler_ and the _Sketch_, _Punch_ with the old black-and-white drawings, atlases that still marked the old boundaries of “Austria-Hungary,” and still put America on the left-hand side of the world, not in the middle; books on foreign travel, illustrated with the three-colour process; sermons of stout old traditional Protestant theology by Inge and Temple and other preachers of the day;—I might sprawl over these and such as these at my leisure, understanding little except the pictures, yet vaguely drinking in the atmosphere of that dead world to which I belong. I should explain that children began their education much earlier in those days, and I had learned to read by the time I was barely seven: at nine, I had a French governess who taught me admirably in her own subject, though she was not, of course, allowed to puzzle my little head with history or science. I think that if I found myself superior in intellectual grasp to many of my contemporaries when I came to face the world later, it was this childish precocity which had laid the foundations of my knowledge.