He had a fat, red face, and he was always smiling. The cook said she wouldn’t have believed that any living mouth could stretch so far. It used to make people angry, because whenever they looked at him he smiled, even when there was nothing at all to smile at. My grandfather said he was like the man in Shakespeare who smiled and was a villain. He liked eating apples and a sweet-stuff called stick-jaw that glued his teeth together. The cook said he was the biggest liar that ever walked the earth. He always pretended he had a serious illness and he must go and see the doctor. But instead he went and played in Regent’s Park. Once he tied his face up in a bandage for two days and said that he was going to the dentist to have a double tooth out. And he borrowed a huge cart-horse from one of the stables in the mews and went for a ride on it, without a saddle, and with an old piece of rope instead of reins; and that was how he got found out. The horse insisted on going past the house when it wanted to return to its stable. He tugged at it as hard as he could to make it go home round the back way, but it refused, and the cook was on the area steps and saw him. She said she wouldn’t have been so certain if he hadn’t had an enormous apple in one hand. When he came next day, he said it was the dentist’s horse, and he had sent him for a ride on it to get rid of the effects of laughing gas. But we knew the very stable where it lived, and so he was dismissed. The housemaid was Irish, and she couldn’t read or write, but she believed in ghosts. She had been a long time in the family too, and she was very fat, with a big pink face and little beady eyes. She was the kindest person I ever knew. Whenever we liked anything she had she always wanted to give it to us, and it really grieved her if we wouldn’t have it. She gave away all her money to the beggars at the garden gate and if she heard of any of us being ill or punished it made her cry, just as if she herself were in trouble. She used to fall about a great deal. If there was any place she could fall into she always did. She said she had measured her length upon every free space of ground in the house, and bumped her head on every stair, and caught her foot in every rug and carpet. But she didn’t let it worry her. One night, when she was standing on the slippery little knob at the end of the bannisters to light the gas outside the studio door, she fell off and lay quite still with her leg doubled under her until the family had finished dinner, because she didn’t want to disturb them by calling out. Once she fell into the drawing-room with a great big tea-tray when there was a tea-party and alarmed the guests exceedingly. But my grandmother was not angry. She said nothing at all, but helped her to get up and pick the tea-things up again.