Our house was in Black Friars’ Street, right around the corner from Peer Down’s Slip in the picture. The Slip was a short cut to school for us boys, and we skipped through it lightly enough, morning, noon, and evening. Mother never passed it, but always went the other way. It stood for the great sorrow of her life, for at the foot of it, where the river ran swiftly, my younger brother was drowned while at play. Theodore was ten. Though my mother had a house full, I do not believe she ever got over the shock of this first great trouble. To me it calls up two things which at the time caused me much wonderment. One was the strange consideration, even deference, with which I was treated by the boys who used to fight me and call me names, in the long week while they dragged the river for the body. Even my arch-enemy, Liar Hans, who skinned cats and hated me, let me alone. It gave me a queer feeling of being deserted and cast out which I made haste to get over when opportunity came. The other had somehow to do with this same experience, though I could not make out the connection. [Illustration: PEER DOWN’S SLIP.] There was in the Old Town among the clergy attached to the Domkirke one with whom my father was on a war footing, so to speak. They were not enemies, for they were Christians. But Pastor Jacobi was a very bright and clever man with a caustic wit of which he was in no wise sparing. Father’s mental equipment was not unlike his in those younger days, and they clashed often, taking instinctively opposite sides in public discussion, until it had come to be understood, among us boys, at least, that they were not friends. Out of such a case we had an easy way; they, being men, could not fight and were forced to carry around their grievance unslaked. Hence my astonishment may be understood when, upon my father answering a knock at the door while we were together in the first burst of grief, I beheld Pastor Jacobi standing on the threshold. Without a word he opened his arms, and my father walked straight into them. So they stood and wept. As I looked at them standing there, I felt that somehow, wholly irregular and incomprehensible as it was, something good had entered that house of mourning, a sweetness that took the sting out of our grief. They were ever after friends. [Illustration: NEIGHBOR QUEDENS.]