It is true, though scarcely credible, that the gas was administered by Mrs. Tuck the dentist’s wife, and that there was no anæsthetist or doctor present. But I daresay Mrs. Tuck performed her office very well, for I had a delightful dream about being in a balloon in the middle of a rainbow. That autumn lessons began again, and until I went to a private school next Easter I suffered under the awful rule of a German governess, not our kind Miss Braun of Lincoln, but a dark-eyed and formidable woman who, I was firmly convinced, must truly have been the terrible Madame de la Rougierre in the tale of Uncle Silas which I was reading then in small instalments, being too frightened to read much at a time. She cannot have been with us long, for before I went to school the beloved Miss Bramston came back, not originally as governess but for another and a tragic reason. The Christmas holidays of 1877 were the last when the whole of the family of six, with my father and mother and Beth, who was absolutely of the family also, were together. My eldest brother Martin was then seventeen, and so great a gulf is fixed between that age and ten, that never, till the day I saw him last, did I form any clear idea of him. Here, then, I must abandon the standpoint I have hitherto maintained, namely, that of speaking of the events of these early years through my own personal recollection of what impression they made on me as the jolly days slipped by, and mingle recollection with subsequent knowledge. At the age of fourteen Martin had won the first open scholarship at Winchester, and had now mentally developed into an extraordinary maturity and wisdom. He took an amazing interest in the political affairs of the day, in classics he was considered to be perhaps the most remarkable scholar that Winchester ever had, and as witness to his innate love of learning there was a library which he had himself acquired, and which must have been unique for a boy of his age. Already at Lincoln he had “spotted” an Albert Dürer woodcut pasted on to the fly-leaf of some trumpery book at a penny bookstall, and had breathlessly conveyed the treasure home, and he and my father used to exchange original Latin versions of hymns. But this precocity of scholarship did not in the least check his boyishness, which verged on the fantastic, for once he appeared in school with four little Japanese dolls attached to the four strings of his shoelaces, and gravely proceeded with his construing. There are notebooks full of his exquisite ridiculous drawings with appropriate text in his minute handwriting: there are poems as ridiculous, and behind it all was this serious limpid spirit....