It was in those few years at Lincoln that my father began to be individual, instead of being part of the landscape, and as I got to know him, I, like the rest of us, also got to fear him. For many years we were none of us at our ease with him, as we always were with my mother, and it is tragic that it was so, for I know that he regarded us all with the tenderest love. Often and often his glorious vitality, keener and more splendid than any I have ever come across, enchanted us, and the sunlight of him was of a midsummer radiance. But he had no idea how blighting his displeasure was to small children, and for fear of incurring it we went delicately like Agag, attending so strictly to our behaviour that all spontaneity withered. Nothing would have pleased him more, had we taken him into our confidence, but we feared his disapproval more than we were drawn to intimacy with him. It was always uncertain whether he would not pull us up with stinging rebukes for offences that were certainly venial, and in his watchfulness over our mental and moral education, he came down upon faults of laziness and carelessness as if to explode such tendencies out of our nature. Earnest and eager all through, and gloriously and tumultuously alive, he brought too heavy guns to bear on positions so lightly fortified as children’s hearts, and from fear of the bombardment we did not dare to make a sortie and go to him. Too much noise, an ordinary childish carelessness might, so we believed, bring down on us a schoolmaster’s reproof instead of such remonstrances as we got from my mother, which were completely successful, and with him we were careful to be decorous to the verge of woodenness. We had washed hands and neat hair and low voices, because thus we minimized the risks of his society. We were never frank with him, we did not talk about the things that interested us, but those which interested him and which we thought he would wish us to be interested in. We sat on the edge of our chairs, and were glad to be gone. If we had been natural with him, I know that his appreciation of that would somehow have made cement between us, but how are you to be natural when, rightly or wrongly, you are being careful? Tearing spirits moderated themselves on his approach, we became as mild as children on chocolate boxes. If he was pleased with us, we breathed sighs of relief: if he was displeased we waited for the clouds to pass. With him I, at least, was a prig and a hypocrite, assuming a demure demeanour, and pretending to be interested in the journal of Bishop Heber of Bombay, which I still maintain is a dreary work, and not suited to young gentlemen of between six and nine years old. But the journal of Bishop Heber was given me as a book to read on Sunday and helped to add to the wearisomeness of that rather appalling day.