After prayers were over, while breakfast was being brought up, it was my task to go round the walls of the dining-room, where hung engravings of eminent personages, and name them. There was the Prince Consort in striped trousers with a bowler hat in his hand, the Duke of Wellington in knee-breeches, the head and shoulders of Dr. Walford, a full length of Dean Stanley, and Dr. Martin Routh in a wig reading a book. Round the edge of this which I think must have been a mezzotint were various small sketches of the said Dr. Martin Routh in other attitudes. Then came the smell of sausages and the advent of two or three sixth form boys who in turn breakfasted with my father. These were very glorious persons and I marvelled at their condescension in coming. Once the head of the school came, and following my father’s example I addressed him by his surname (whatever it was) without the prefix of “Mister,” for which omission I was corrected. But out of his magnificence he did not seem to mind. Slowly, as the mists of infancy dispersed through which like sundered mountain-tops were seen these scattered incidents, a more panoramic vision of life as a coherent whole made its appearance. There had been vignettes, now of the Wilderness, now of my father’s study, now of the nursery, with nothing except the continuous association with Beth to bind them together. But now these scattered localities became parts of one connected picture, and I could form some sort of complete idea of the place. Most important was the house, the Master’s Lodge, a red brick building standing in its own grounds. You entered through a gabled porch into a broad passage, on one side of which lay my father’s study. Glass doors separated this from the huge immensity of the hall, with my mother’s sitting-room, the drawing-room and the dining-room opening out of it. The stairs started in the centre of it and after one flight separated into two, each of which led up into a gallery that skirted three sides of the hall. Bedrooms opened out of this, also the day nursery and night nursery, and pitch-pine banisters (a wood much admired at that time) ran round it, and it was through these banisters that one morning my sister Maggie, in a fit of wonderful audacity inserted her foot, and exclaimed, “That’s my foot, Alleluia.” In the nursery, the room with which I was chiefly concerned, was a rocking-horse with wide red nostrils and movable pummels. These pummels penetrated right through his dappled skin, and by removing them it was possible to drop small objects like pebbles into his inside, where they rattled agreeably as he rocked. Once some one of us, tempting Fate, held a penny at this remarkable aperture, and the penny dropped inside, so that Beth had to turn the rocking-horse upside down and shake him until it was restored to currency again. There was a low deal table, quantities of lead soldiers, and a swing hung from the ceiling, so that altogether it presented most agreeable features.