Of babies he would say: "There is something
gigantic about them. The wide-eyed wonder of a
babe has a grandeur in it which as children they lose.
They seem to me to be prophets of a mightier race."

To his own children he was devoted. From the
first he would, when my mother and he were alone,
carry me in my bassinet into the drawing-room that he
might watch my baby-gestures; and one of the very
early things which I remember is that he helped the
Master of Balliol to toss my brother and myself in a
shawl. Later, he made us, though still very young, as
much as possible his little companions. My mother
was not strong enough to walk as far as we did, and so
my father would harness my brother and myself to her
garden carriage, and himself push from behind; and
in this fashion we raced up hill and down dale. When
the days were warm enough, perhaps we sat together
on a bank in one of our home-fields, and he would read
to us, or in cold weather would play football with us
boys in an old chalk-pit, or build castles of flint on the
top of the "Beacon Cliff," and we all then cannonaded
from a distance, or he would teach us to shoot with bow
and arrow. Some days we went flower-hunting, and on
our return home, if the flower was unknown, he would
say, "Bring me my Baxter Flowering Plants," to look
it out for us.

If it was rainy or stormy, and we were kept indoors,
he often built cities for us with bricks, or played battle-
dore and shuttlecock; or sometimes he read Grimm
Fairy Stories or repeated ballads to us. I remember his
emphatic recitation in those far-off years of

Malbrouck s'en va-t'en guerre,
Mironton, mironton, mirontaine,"

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