Once, I remember, he woke up from one of his naps (vigilant naps they were, for if one of us blundered he was wide-awake in a moment), and was minded to be grotesquely humorous. Someone was construing, I forget what, when all of a sudden he suggested as a translation, “Oh, dear! what can the matter be?” and asked whether any of us could quote the next line. One suggested a repetition of the same line; another “Johnnie’s so long at the fair.” “Wrong! Quite wrong,” he said, “the second line is ‘_Dear! Dear!_ What can the matter be?’” Dismally he grinned at his own fun, which did not raise even a sycophantic smile, and then composed himself once more to “yet a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep.” And so the dreary pedagogic round droned on. What would I not give now to have had the privilege of passing that year and a half under the illuminating tuition of Dr. Hawtrey! What a gift to be able to teach and in teaching please—practically to strike out from the dictionary the hateful word “lessons!” CHAPTER IV SUMMER HOLIDAYS “Cretâ an carbone notandi?” The summer holidays of 1851 shall be “noted” with the whitest of chalk. The first three or four days were spent in London exploring the treasures and wonders of the Fairy Palace which the imagination of the Prince Consort and the talent of Paxton called up in Hyde Park—of which Sydenham gives no conception. It was but a baby compared with the great exhibitions—labyrinthine cities in themselves—by which it was followed—but it was so graceful, so delicate, so airy, that its translucent beauty remains graven on my memory as something which must defy all rivalry. When first I saw it glittering in the morning sun, I felt as if Aladdin and the Jin who was the slave of the lamp must have been at work upon it—no mere human hands and hammers and builders’ tools could have wrought such a miracle. A single relic marks the site: one of the two great elms which were enclosed in it, now a feeble old truncated pollard, piously fenced in by the care of those who rule the Park, still stands in the great stretch of grass opposite the Knightsbridge Barracks; its mate sickened and died.