Never before had I worn these on a week-day morning, but all conversation not germane to the question of getting into them quickly my mother swept aside; and when I was complete, down even to the new shoes--Bluchers, we called them in those days--took me by the hand, and together we crept down as we had crept up, silent, stealthy and alert. My mother led me to the street door and opened it. “Shan't I want my cap?” I whispered. But my mother only shook her head and closed the door with a bang; and then the explanation of the pantomime came to me, for with such “business”--comic, shall I call it, or tragic?--I was becoming familiar; and, my mother's hand upon my shoulder, we entered my father's office. Whether from the fact that so often of an evening--our drawing-room being reserved always as a show-room in case of chance visitors; Cowper's poems, open face-downwards on the wobbly loo table; the half-finished crochet work, suggestive of elegant leisure, thrown carelessly over the arm of the smaller easy-chair--this office would become our sitting-room, its books and papers, as things of no account, being huddled out of sight; or whether from the readiness with which my father would come out of it at all times to play at something else--at cricket in the back garden on dry days or ninepins in the passage on wet, charging back into it again whenever a knock sounded at the front door, I cannot say. But I know that as a child it never occurred to me to regard my father's profession as a serious affair. To me he was merely playing there, surrounded by big books and bundles of documents, labelled profusely but consisting only of blank papers; by japanned tin boxes, lettered imposingly, but for the most part empty. “Sutton Hampden, Esq.,” I remember was practically my mother's work-box. The “Drayton Estates” yielded apparently nothing but apples, a fruit of which my father was fond; while “Mortgages” it was not until later in life I discovered had no connection with poems in manuscript, some in course of correction, others completed. Now, as the door opened, he rose and came towards us. His hair stood up from his head, for it was a habit of his to rumple it as he talked; and this added to his evident efforts to compose his face into an expression of businesslike gravity, added emphasis, if such were needed, to the suggestion of the over long schoolboy making believe. “This is the youngster,” said my father, taking me from my mother, and passing me on. “Tall for his age, isn't he?” With a twist of his thick lips, he rolled the evil-smelling cigar he was smoking from the left corner of his mouth to the right; and held out a fat and not too clean hand, which, as it closed round mine, brought to my mind the picture of the walrus in my natural history book; with the other he flapped me kindly on the head.