Here are stamps—be seated, take it on your knees—issued by the last Tsar of Russia. Here is the lost dominion of that Emperor William whom the other nations of Europe brought to book. Here are the double eagles of the old Austrian Empire. Here is a common English stamp with the post-mark “Dublin.” Here are the pretty, fantastic devices turned out by the short-lived commonwealth of Czecho-Slovakia. Here is France represented in a cap of liberty, “that woman bowling a no-ball,” my father used to call it, with no emblem of religion on the whole extent of the paper. Here is the Crescent lording it over Macedonia, here is republican Portugal, here is Iceland tributary to Denmark. What a history lesson for you on these strangely-milled slips of gummed paper! Yes, you may crow over me as you will, but you must envy me my stamp album. Am I wrong, or do the _events_ of childhood impress themselves less on the mind than often repeated scenes and habitual occupations? For myself, it is scenes that I can reconstruct rather than moments, habits rather than incidents. I can recall, for example, as if it were yesterday, the picture, annually viewed, of my mother making pot-pourri. She moved like a priestess over a mystical circle of rose leaves, her decoctions around her: I was allowed to hold the bottles, never to pour. Cinnamon, and orris root, and oil of cloves, and vervein, and vanilla were jealously dropped, to give the poor petals immortality. I will not make pot-pourri any more, since a chemist, unworthy of the name, has begun to deny knowledge of the very ingredients. Nor can I recapture that lost fragrance which would bring back my mother to the mysterious receiving-station of the senses; nor will anything make me buy the pot-pourri they sell you nowadays, “an imposture, my dear,” a friend has warned me, “which seems to be made of nothing but peppermint and eucalyptus.” My father, as is right, I recollect in sterner moods. Especially during one difficult fortnight, when he had strained his arm through a fall downstairs, and was confined, chafing, to the entourage of the house. It was, I think, characteristic of the man’s energy that he should have set about teaching me to play golf. I was five years old at the time, and a pardonably unapt pupil. You must picture me on the “tennis-lawn,” with an old putter swung over my shoulder, almost too heavy for my feeble strength, while he encourages me to drive. “Feet square, confound you! No, like this! Now, keep your eye on the ball; the end of the club will get on all right without you ogling it, you minx! Good Lord! you’re under it again ... there, there, don’t cry; replace the divot before Mummy sees it.” He was an indulgent father, but he had no sympathy with weakness of the moral fibre, and I sometimes think that it is to him I owe, under Providence, the doggedness of character with which I have heard my friends credit me.