Another characteristic which Algernon inherited from his mother was the voice. All who knew him must remember that exquisitely soft voice with a rather sing-song intonation, like that of the Russians when they put the music of their own Slav voices into the French language. All his mother’s brothers and sisters had it. He alone, so far as I know, among my cousins reproduced it. Listening to him sometimes I could almost fancy that I could hear my aunt herself speaking, so startling was the likeness. His language, even at that age, was beautiful, fanciful, and richly varied. Altogether my recollection of him in those school-days is that of a fascinating, most lovable little fellow. It is but a child’s impression of another child, but I believe it to be just. That morning, after the manner of little dogs and little boys, we stood and looked at one another shyly, suspiciously; but by the time his parents left we had become fast friends and so we remained. We had something in common to make us sib besides the sisterhood of his mother and mine. On our fathers’ side we both came from old Northumbrian stocks, and there is something in the Borderland which makes for a feeling of kinship, even if in ancient times there should have been blood feuds. Under the spell of the Border feeling Swinburne was bewitched; it never lost its power over him. The wind blowing over those wild moors, which are still the home of legends and ballads of raids and fights and deeds of derring-do, had pierced his soul. He was a true son of Northumbria, and was eager to become a soldier and bear arms; little creature as he was, had he lived in the old days, he would have carried a stout heart into any fray where there might be the clash of steel against morion and breastplate, leading a troop of his own people like Barry of the Comb, or Corbit Jock, in an expedition over the Border against Eliots and Kers, and Scots and Maxwells. He was born three centuries too late. Of course, being in different houses, we could not be so constantly together as if we had both been in the same house. I was at Evans’s and Durnford was my tutor. He was at Joynes’s and of course Joynes was his tutor. Still we often met, and pretty frequently breakfasted together, he with me, or I with him. Chocolate in his room, tea in mine. The guest brought his own “order” of rolls and butter, and the feast was made rich by the addition of sixpennyworth of scraped beef or ham from Joe Groves’s, a small sock-shop which was almost immediately under Joynes’s house. Little gifts such as our humble purses could afford cemented our friendship; I still possess and treasure an abbreviated edition of Froissart’s Chronicles which Algernon gave me now, alas! sixty-six years ago. We ourselves were abbreviated editions in those days, or rather duodecimos!