awakened by the soft-stepping night-shirted figure, and moved aside in bed to give room for him to sit there, and there would be plans to be made, and then combining friendship with stag-beetles into one incomparable compound we would take the stag-beetles (for there were two of them, male and female called “The Monarch of the Glen” and “Queen”) out of my washing basin, where they passed the night in optimistic attempts to climb its slippery sides, and refresh them with a breakfast of elm leaves and perhaps the half of a strawberry. They had to be put back into two match-boxes which were their travelling carriages before Jane the matron came round, for she had said that if ever she found stag-beetles in basins again she would throw them out of the window. An “Exeat” now and then diversified the course of the term, and these I spent with my Aunt Eleanor who had married Mr. Thomas Hare, famous for his book on the _Representation of Minorities_. He was a great friend of John Stuart Mill, whom Aunt Eleanor, for some reason of her own, always called “Mr. Mills.” They lived in a house near Surbiton which had a tower in it, on the top floor of which was Uncle Hare’s laboratory, chemistry being a hobby of his, and he made oxygen in glass retorts, and put snippets of potassium to scurry, flaring and self-lit, on the surface of a basin of water.... On the 5th of November every year I was asked to a children’s party, given by Princess Mary, Duchess of Teck, at the White Lodge, Richmond Park, and there was an immense tea followed by fireworks in the garden. There we were given squibs and told to be sure to throw them away as soon as they burned low, before the explosion came at the end, and on one of these occasions the Duke of Teck wanting a light for his cigar told me to give him my squib, for he had no matches. I told him that it was already burning low, but he said “Wass?” rather alarmingly, and so I handed it to him. He had just applied the burning end of it to his cigar when the explosion came, and his face and hair were covered with sparks, and he danced about, and said sonorous things in German, and I gathered that he was vexed....