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I was the eldest child and only boy of a family of five, all still living.* My birth took place four years after the marriage of my parents and was, I believe, preceded by a miscarriage. The newly married couple had taken a little semi-detached flint house (1 St. John's Grove), in a quiet street in old Croydon leading up to the venerable Parish Church, which had not then been burnt out, and so much of its ancient beauty list. This small old Surrey town was then chiefly known as once an ancient seat of the Archbishop of Canterbury and later of a Military Academy at Addiscombe which disappeared shortly before my time. It has since become the chief suburb of London, and the healthiest town of its size in the kingdom, a position it partly owed to Dr. Alfred Carpenter, an ardent sanitary reformer, who was our family doctor. Throughout the rest of his life he never forgot the wild stormy night which preceded the 2nd of February, 1859, when I was born at a quarter past eight in the morning.

[* My sister Louie has since died (1928).]

The year 1859 was long known as the year of the great comet, but it is now more permanently and famously known as the year of the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species, one of the greatest dates in the whole history of science. But that is far from exhausting the memorable events which were crowded into that most fruitful year, not only in various branches of science but in life and art, in thought and literature, even in religion. In the world of action this was the year of Italian Unity; the Red Cross Society was founded by Dunant and the first Cottage Hospital built; Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, the first English woman doctor (whom later I met), was placed on the English Medical Register; the Suez Canal was commenced. In religion it became known among Evangelical revivalists as "the Glorious Year," while by the simultaneous publication of Essays and Reviews there began also the spiritual revival of the Anglican Church. In the sphere of thought J. S. Mill published his Essay on Liberty which has been well described as "the most spendid statement of the ideal of Individualism." In literature George Eliot and George Meredith both published what are in some respects their most characteristic and famous novels, Adam Bede and Richard Feierel, while yet more significant was the publication by Fitzgerald of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, and this immortal little book appeared in the midst of the fine poetic work of Rossetti, William Morris, and Swinburne, which marks the close of that decade. It was in 1859, again, that Mistral's beautiful and ever memorable Mireille appeared. In art Millet painted "L'Angélus," and Whistler produced his Thames etchings, both works which profoundly influenced the following half century whatever may be ultimately thought of them, while the date is also historic, Pennell has remarked, for it is that of the publication of Once a Week, which began the era of good illustration. It is, however, in pure science, after all, that the year 1859 displayed the most varied and memorable activities. The new spectroscopic astronomy began under Kirchhoff and the sun's chemical composition was discovered; Hoffmeister laid the foundations of the morphology of plants; the definite triumph of the belief in the antiquity of Man took place by Boucher de Perthes' at first questioned discovery of palaeolithic instruments being finally proved, so that in 1859, as Gaudry says, "the study of fossil man began;" Broca founded the Société d'Anthropologie de Paris and therewith originated the scientific study of anthropology; the first journal of folk-lore was established in Germany; and Kuhn, the founder of comparative mythology, published his chief work, Ueber die Herabkunft des Feuers; Moreau de Tours initiated the psychological study of genius; and Lombroso conceived that idea of the anthropological method of studying criminals and other abnormal groups which in its transformations has proved so fruitful. Nor are the intellectual energies of this great year herewith exhausted. It would probably be difficult to name any one year in the whole history of mankind in which the human spirit was more profoundly stirred to more manifold original achievement. It seemed worth while to me to enumerate some of these achievements in order to indicate the spiritual atmosphere into which I was born, the atmosphere in which I was bathed, for it was as I grew up that the significance of these achievements began to be perceived.

I entered the world in a raging tempest, but however symbolic that omen may or may not have been for my life, there was nothing obviously tempestuous about the infant. I was a large child with a large head, as it still remains, so that labour proved tedious and the forceps were used. I remained a large fine healthy baby, suckled at the breast, and deserving, my mother was told, a prize at the baby show then being held, In the earliest portrait, a daguerreotype long since lost (I had lent it to Olive Schreiner, and in one of her sudden migrations from lodgings she left it behind), I looked out into the world from my mother's lap in all the robust and fearless selfsatisfaction of babyhood. It was, however, the only portrait in which I ever manifested that attitude. In the next, dating a year or so later, one sees a rather sad, puzzled, and forlorn little child placed on a large chair and carefully dressed in a frock and an ornamental hat with rosettes coming down over the ears. It is clearly the same child that stands before us in the next picture, though now grown more intelligent and more self-possessed, a little fellow in knickerbockers, no longer fat, and with a restless, nervous, anxious look on his face. It is a look of which I seem to find the incipient trace in the Olivers, and henceforth, even if not obvious, I think it is still usually latent. The eyes are those of a sensitive traveller in a strange land, eager indeed for friendly response, but always apprehensive of hostility. Of Nature I have never been afraid. But the world has always seemed to me to be full of strange human beings, so unknown, mysterious, and awe-inspiring, so apt to give joy or pain, so apt also to receive either. I have always felt a mixed reverence and fear of human creatures, so that I have sometimes even been afraid to look into the eyes of strangers; they seemed to me gates into chambers where intimate and terrible secrets lie bare.

It is probable that the change I have noted in my expression and appearance was connected with a change in my health. I was a very robust baby, but I was a somewhat delicate child. I cannot recall what the symptoms were, I think they were rather vague. But I know that my mother took me from time to time to a London physician who, so far as I can recall, spoke reassuringly. My earliest recollection dates from the age of about two years, or perhaps earlier. We were moving into a new house—evidently the ugly little semi-detached villa, now replaced by shops at the Addiscombe end of Cherry Orchard Road, which is the earliest house I recall—and the nursemaid who was carrying me placed her burden for a moment on the kitchen dresser. The novelty of that lofty and unusual position furnished the first stimulus to perception strong enough to last permanently in memory. (Rather similarly, Ibsen's earliest memory was of being carried by his nurse to the top of a church tower.) There are other recollections that are faint, often trivial. I recall the little Chinese figure of a crouching monkey in soapstone which my mother would give me from off the mantelpiece, as later to her other infant children in succession, to play with in bed in the early morning; somehow the feel of it seems as though it had moulded my fingers to sensation. I recall, for some unknown reason, when still a small child in a frock, running round and round the table till I was tired. I recall, too, the eldest of my baby sisters who appeared when I was four. "Take away that piece of dirt and rubbish," I am said to have exclaimed with the jealousy of childhood. That feeling seems soon to have passed. I can only remember my baby sister as the object of my care and attention.

These memories are vague. The only definite memory of this time is of once accompanying the nurse who was wheeling the perambulator with the baby along Morland Road. The nurse stood still and I heard a mysterious sound as of a stream of water descending to the earth. I recall no feeling of interest or curiosity on my part, but the fact that I recall the incident at all seems to indicate that at that moment I was for the first time touched by the strange mystery of woman. It was not till years later that I felt any interest or curiosity in women or in any aspect of sex, however childish. For my mother I had always an equable and unquestioning affection, which seems to have been entirely free from any of those complications to which the child's affection for his mother is now supposed to be liable, even though it may be in part true that it is out of such affection, and on the model of such affection, that the youth's late sexual love of woman is moulded. There was no physical intimacy, her love for her children was not of the petting kind, and there were never any curiosities on my part; when these later arose they were turned in other directions. Nor was there ever any trace of jealousy on my part with regard to my father. That indeed may in any case have been excluded by the fact that he was such a stranger in his own house. We saw but little of him, and we always accepted him, as a matter of course and willingly, though there was little or no opportunity for warm affection to spring up, for even during his stays in London he had to be away all day at the ship or the office, and Sundays were too formal and sacred to be conducive to intimacy.

There was, I believe, nothing remarkable or precocious about my childhood, though I easily learned to read at the age of five. I was a fairly active child, and it was noted as a peculiarity of my gait that in running I would take a little leap every few steps; the latent tendency to this movement seems to remain with me still. Perhaps the most characteristic incident in my early childhood, which impressed my mother for she would refer to it in after years, occurred when I once stood stock-still in the middle of the road, for no obvious reason, and for some time could not be induced to move. I do not recall this manifestation of instinctive obstinacy, but in it I clearly detect myself. It may well be to this grim silent persistence, deaf to persuasion, that I owe whatever little success I may have achieved in preserving intact my own individuality and carrying out my own projects, with indifference to the shifting attitudes of society or the law.

Yet in these trifling childhood memories—my own and those of others in regard to me—there was nothing uncommon to childhood. I was just a rather shy, sensitive, reserved, welldispositioned child, not goody-goody, but completely free from any of the mischievous tricks of childhood (though once, for no remembered reason, I threw my boots into the fire), and equally without any impulses of pugnacity, such as are regarded as the proper attribute of immature virility. I was more disposed to be helpful than to fight and I remember how once in the Morland Road a boy and a girl of the working class, carrying a basket of washing, invited me to help by carrying one end which, without question, I immediately did, and was afterwards, when I arrived home late, mildly reproved by my mother. In all this I was far from being a weak, sickly, or psychically morbid child, and in physical development I was always above the average. But in what the doctors called "stamina" I was below the average; I had no exuberance of physical energy, no strong impulse to muscular exercise or games, though I joined in them when it was not easy to refuse, and this was combined with some degree of muscular awkwardness. I was, I believe, naturally left-handed; I have never been able to throw a ball with my right hand, and though I have never written with my left hand, my right-handed use of the pen was always the despair of my teachers. All my energy seems to have been in my brain, and that was rather of the massive and receptive than of the impulsive and active sort. With such a temperament it was natural that reading soon became my preferred pleasure, and I had no brothers or boyfriends to incite me to more social amusements.

One other trivial incident of childhood, when I was about six, may be mentioned, because it made a clear and lasting impression on my mind and represented my first introduction to art, which later became so keen an interest in my life. The twin villa to ours in Cherry Orchard Road was occupied by a fair, consumptive, newly-married young artist called Robert Barnes. He belonged to the great circle which from the year 1859 so brilliantly revived wood-engraving in England. Like many others of the group, he was also a painter; we were sometimes in his house, he introduced my sister, who was a pretty child, into some of his drawings, and it was on his easel that I first saw a freshly painted picture; I remember it still, an old woman outside a cottage door with a bird in a basket cage by her side. He gave me a volume of Mrs. Barbauld's which he had illustrated, and I still possess it. A little later Robert Barnes became a highly successful artist in black and white; he was prodigiously active and, though he had no great brilliance or originality, there was a delicate individuality in his gracious and homely pictures; when we were children of a little higher age, and he was illustrating many of the current magazines, we had no difficulty in detecting his hand immediately. His health improved, he became prosperous, and had a large family; it so chanced that when finally we moved to the house at Redhill in which my mother died, a house of much the same character as that in Cherry Orchard Road, Robert Barnes and his family were occupying a large and handsome house in the neighbourhood and the old friendly relationship was resumed after an interval of a quarter of a century. I have sometimes thought that I ought myself to have been an artist, but this early contact incited no artistic ambitions, though as a child, like many other children, I delighted in a paint-box and experienced that peculiar sensitive reaction to the qualities of different pigments which is probably common among children. My mother never cared to make her home on board ship, but when I was seven years old it was decided, doubtless for the benefit of my health, that I should accompany my father on a voyage round the world in the Empress, an American-built wooden sailing-ship, belonging to Holder Brothers, which he then commanded. On this voyage my father was to take from Queenstown to New South Wales a large number of Roman Catholic passengers, including several bishops, numerous priests, and many nuns. Up to this point the memories of childhood that remain with me are few and for the most part trivial. But from this moment they become extremely numerous, indeed almost continuous, and though surrounded as it were by haze they are much more vivid than before.

When I think of these days a number of pictures come on my mind: Sister Agnes, the gentle quiet nun who had charge of my education during the passage, and was later, as a priest has since told me, at the head of a convent;* the good-natured old Mother Superior, who was always giving me little presents, some of which I still preserve; Father Doyle, a merry middleaged ecclesiastic who was never tired of playing innocently mischievous pranks; it may possibly have been he who incited me to pull the whiskers of a solemn gentleman called Walsh, who promptly boxed my ears; these are but a few of the many persons on board who all stand out clearly in memory.

[* More than sixty years later, and after her death, it was stated in Australian newspapers that she remembered me well to the end and used to tell of my little childish pranks. It is strange to me that she should have been able to identify Harry Ellis, the captain's young son, with the later author Havelock Ellis, and I have wondered if there was not somewhere here a touch of Irish imagination; but I like to think that I may have been with her a pleasant memory to the end, as she also will be to me.]

Not the least vivid is the kindly German steward, simple-minded, well educated, and capable—a most typical German—who was much concerned for my mental improvement and lent me beautifully illustrated books of natural history because he thought I read toi many stories. Nothing stands out more clearly in memory than the ship's library in my father's cabin. This was the finest treasure-house I had yet come on, and I was free to search in it as though my own. Here I found Hans Andersen whom I read with delight, but with still greater delight Marryat's Masterman Ready, a story of the Robinson Crusoe type and by far the most ravishing book I had yet discovered.

Of Sydney, though there my father had various old friends to whom I was taken, my memories are fainter.* But from Sydney we sailed to Callao and the Chincha Islands to load guano for Antwerp, and here my memories are much more numerous and vivid than those of Sydney. Here I first came within reach of the far-off echoes of that old-world Spain which afterwards became so fascinating to me.

[* I may here remark that what is perhaps my earliest extant letter was written home from the Empress at Sydney in October, 1866. It is substantially much the same kind of letter I might write now. "I like travelling," I wrote, "though I should not wish to be a sailor," and after expressing admiration for Sydney, I added: "I was much amused with the trees in the Government gardens, reading their names and the countries they came from, some of them with more flowers than leaves, and the others very curious." I still find amusement in a similar occupation. It is strange to note that below my signature appears a flourish which is the obvious original of that I now use.]

I recall the penetrating and pungent odour of the guano which filled the air all day long on board ship, the most massive odour I have ever known. I recall the old coloured woman who sold fruit on the island and always gave me a large bunch of black grapes, until at last I grew tired of grapes and refused any longer to accept her presents; even yet I have not recovered any taste for black grapes. I recall, again, how my father took me with him to Lima where the great Spanish gateways leading into the patios especially appealed to me, and it seems significant to me now that the first really foreign city I ever saw should have been one of Spanish tradition. Here, too, I first saw great mountains; the enormous range of the Andes seemed to rise from the coast and frown over the ship; I used to watch these mountains intensely and remember how I vainly sought to make out through the glass the nature of the moving spots my keen eyes could just discern on the mountain slopes. There are other memories of Callao and the Chinchas. Here I first had a boy companion of about my own age, son of a captain who was an old friend of my father's; sometimes we were allowed to take the dinghy and go round among the rocks on the island coast, gathering great starfish and all the strange living things we could find. My companion, I remember, once confided to me his scatologic interests in his own person, but I was but mildly interested—not repelled, merely indifferent; the association of grace and beauty would have been needed to arouse my interest. This same boy also confided to me his habit of what I, much later, learned to know was commonly called masturbation, though, as he told me, it was simply a method of promoting the wholesome development of the organs, an object which seemed to me entirely praiseworthy. On his recommendation I attempted, with the best motives, to follow his instructions, but the results were fortunately in every respect completely negative; so that I soon abandoned my attempts and thought no mire of the matter. In this connection I should also mention—for it is all that there is to mention—that during the voyage I sometimes associated with an amiable quiet apprentice about fifteen years of age, and I recall on one or two occasions when we were alone together that he permitted or possibly encouraged me to insert my hand into his trousers and gently to touch his sexual organs; my feeling was simply one of reverent admiration for what seemed to my childish mind their magnitude. There was another apprentice, a clever youth rather older, who would tell me long stories as we walked up and down the deck; the only one I recall (probably because he told me not to repeat it) was slightly indecent and dealt with the embarrassment of a young married couple over the problem of undressing together on their wedding night; the story went no further and seemed to me complete; sexual problems had no interest, or rather no existence, for me at this age, and for years after. It was at Callao, or the Chinchas, that I found my first girl playmate, a captain's daughter whose name I no longer remember. But I well remember the hours I spent with her on the poop, hidden in a great sail, where we played at keeping house, always with natural decorum; she was just a congenial playmate for whom I felt no further emotions of affection or admiration; indeed it is satisfactory to me to recall that throughout my childhood to the age of twelve, however nervous a child I may have seemed, all my emotions were wholesomely undeveloped and blunt, never at any point exasperated into acute sensibility. But it was on this coast of Peru, it seems to me, at the age of seven, that I first gained full self-consciousness; I was beginning to become a person.

On leaving Callao we had a passenger, a young Englishman called Whelock, whose name remains with me because I associate it with one of those unaccountable impulses of obstinacy which seem to have been in my original nature. I recall him as a kind and gentle and well-bred man; there was apparently something to me antipathetic about him. He gave me a novel by Mrs. Craik, A Noble Life, in the Tauchnitz Series. It was an altogether kindly act, yet for some reason, which has always been completely obscure to me, I refused to thank him, and for a long time would not touch the book, though I ultimately read it. Some latent cause there must have been for my ungraciousness—possibly it was shyness taking on the form of rudeness—but I have never known what it was. I recall another obscure impulse of a more definite character manifested at some time during the voyage. There was a large cat on board, a favourite with the sailors, who had fastened various objects round its neck. One day I was watching this cat making his way between the rails at the ship's stern; he was sure-footed, but the position was perilous, a touch would send him into the sea. Moved by a sudden impulse, when the cat was passing to the seaward side of the rail, I supplied that touch. I at once went to my father and told him the cat had fallen overboard and a rope was thrown over, but the cat had already disappeared. No one suspected me of any part in the cat's death, and I never revealed to anyone—I believe unto this day—that I was guilty in the matter. I have always, however, regarded it as a criminal act. One other action of my childhood—occurring, I think, a little later, after my return home—I may mention here to complete the criminal record. My mother kept a purse containing pence behind the clock on the sitting-room mantelpiece for convenience in paying small household expenses. One day—calmly, without a struggle, and possibly even without sense of wrong-doing—I helped myself to pence from this purse and bought and ate some pears, a fruit for which I still retain a special liking. I was discovered—I am not even sure whether I maintained concealment—and no doubt duly punished. This remains in my mind as an objective incident, and I have no recollection of its subjective side. It was evidently an unreasoning impulse, aroused by a sudden irresistible desire for the pears seen in the shop. But I have no other memories to indicate that I was ever greedy. In this sphere they are only of antipathies, as with the black grapes, and also a permanent dislike of seed-cake, sago pudding, and bread and jam; and though I had early acquired an ineradicable tendency, which probably contributed to my liability to indigestion, to eat fast, this was not attributable to greediness.

These two incidents of my childhood have been useful to me in showing how impulses which can only be called criminal are always liable to arise in childhood; they clearly have little significance and should not be treated too seriously. They come to me out of the past, detached from their environment, almost like dreams. This also is true of my memory of the first time I saw a corpse. As the ship sailed swiftly past, I observed the floating body, as it seemed to me, of a negro in a red shirt, though the negroid effect may possibly have been due to discoloration; I alone saw it, and with my characteristic reticence said nothing about it.

From Callao the Empress conveyed its freight of guano round Cape Horn to Antwerp. I recall nothing of the voyage except that one day near the Horn I nearly cried from the bitter cold. But of Antwerp memories crowd too thickly for record. It was the first foreign city I ever really lived in. The magnificent Docks and the great Promenoirs were not then built, but otherwise the essential features of the riverside seem to remain the same to-day as they were then. On arrival my father took me on shore with him to stay for a few days at a little hotel facing the quay, kept by Flemish people. I remember the landlady's two buxom daughters, their busy ways, the perpetual "Ja! Ja!" shouted amid banging doors. An event which is always important in a child's life happened at Antwerp. My father took me and the two girls of the house to my first circus. I vividly recall the unending stream of whooping horsemen who wildly stamped round the ring, disappearing on one side to re-emerge on the other, and I recall, too, how the involuntary exuberance of my delight was enjoyed by the two girls at my side. Evidently at the time I had not acquired the undemonstrative impassibility which, however strong my emotion, I was subsequently wont to show, just as, also, I had scarcely acquired my shyness, for on the Empress I used to sing in public, with much enjoyment, to the accompaniment of the piano, a social achievement I cannot imagine at any later period. A few days later my father took me home with him by Harwich. He was to bring the family back to Antwerp, but my mother doubtless wished to see me without a day's unnecessary delay. It is perhaps characteristic of the random and inconsequent impressions of a child's mind that while I recall vividly my return to the Addiscombe house—the end house on the Croydon side of Addiscombe Terrace—the appearance of the dining-room grown small and unfamiliar in my eyes, the look of the spread table, even the salt-cellars, I have not the faintest memory of the meeting with my mother after a yearlong absence. Affection is undeveloped in early life.

We all went over at once, with the nurse-girl, to Antwerp, to spend there many weeks of the summer of 1867 while the ship was unloading, a much slower process than it has since become. We lodged in a little house on the outskirts of the city not far from a large bare tract on which ruined forts were still standing, a district which is now probably that covered by fashionable streets. One morning before breakfast, in the gratification of one of my earliest impulses of scientific curiosity, I resolved to count the number of cannon-ports in a large deserted old fort. Placing a good-sized stick on the ground, so that I might know when my task was completed, I carefully proceeded to march round, counting the holes as I went. But after continuing this process for some time I realised that I had missed the stick and looking around in bewilderment I had some difficulty in orienting myself. By the time that was accomplished I fear scientific curiosity had evaporated and I quickly went back to breakfast.

It was a very hot summer and I recall the sensation of being kept awake by the heat—though I had never suffered from heat in the tropics—in the close bedroom where we children and the nursemaid slept in separate beds, while the interminably long goods-trains (I had succeeded in counting the number of wagons in these) rattled on the railway line not far off. This weather brought on an attack of diarrhoea, and I recall the deliciously blissful sensations, such as I have never experienced since even after a large dose of the same drug, produced by the chlorodyne my mother administered to me. About the same time I had my first attack of the severe nose-bleeding which reappeared at intervals until my departure from Australia fourteen years later. On this first occasion we were out with Jack, the big sailor boy who sometimes looked after us, and he lent me his huge pocket handkerchief on this long dreary walk. I experienced more illness and discomfort on this brief visit to Antwerp than during all the vicissitudes of the long voyage round the world, which seemed to have suited me perfectly.

My mother had not been to Antwerp before, I doubt even if she had been abroad before, though she several times went to Antwerp and to Hamburg afterwards, and she desired my father to show her all the sights. I sometimes accompanied my parents to the churches and to the Picture Gallery, an oldfashioned and unpretentious building very unlike the present Royal Museum. Only one picture remains in my memory, and that doubtless because my mother, who always had an engraving of it in her bedroom, must have observed it with special attention: Rubens' Descent from the Cross in the Cathedral. I mention this because a little point of psychological interest in relation to memory is connected with it. I never visited Antwerp again till fifteen years later, but when I once more saw the "Descent" hanging in the transept, I was astonished to find it was by no means either so large or so high up as in the memory I retained of it. To the small child everything seems larger than to the adult, and the world is a different place. (Probably also it is a different place to the small as compared to the large adult.) Nearly twenty years elapsed before I saw the picture a third time, but the second interval involved no readjustment of my impression.

After we returned home to Addiscombe I was again sent to Mrs. Granville's school in St. James's Road whither I had gone for a short time before the voyage. At this period the memories of my life and my school grew ever more numerous and definite. The persons and characters of my teachers—a Miss Frowde, a Miss Cox, a Miss Bell—still stand out vividly in my mind. I could describe their appearance and their widely varying characters, and one or two of my schoolfellows are almost as distinct. But this moment of my life scarcely seems of special significance for later development and it is unnecessary to dwell on it. I have described even trivial details of the voyage on the Empress when memory first began to be stable because there is always a certain interest in the beginnings of things, but it would be tedious, and quite unnecessary, to record minutely the ever-growing stream of later memories, even if such a detailed record were possible.

One or two memories of the school are perhaps of some significance. I remember that a schoolfellow called Smith—it was my first acquaintance with that large and admirable family—took me off with himself and his brother to play cricket, talking seriously to me of the importance of skill in games; he had evidently observed—what I had myself discovered—that I had no natural expertness in physical exercises. I also remember that Mrs. Granville—who was a remarkable old lady and professed great admiration for Pestalozzi and his methods—once asked my mother if I was quite right in my head. The idea seems to have been suggested to her by her misapprehension of one of the games played in the schoolground, and no defect in school was alleged. My mother was indignant at the suggestion, quite naturally and reasonably, for it was never made by anyone else at that time, however "odd," at a later period, some people may have considered me. Still, it is possible that this shrewd and intelligent old lady ought to have the credit of first detecting in me whatever strain of mental anomaly I may possess.

At Addiscombe Terrace there was a long, though not large, garden, with a door in the wall at the end leading into a road at the back. It was well stocked with apple-trees and plum-trees, and cherry-trees against the wall; while a large guelder-rose, at the end of the little lawn, always impressed my youthful mind by the vastness of its white globular blossoms. We children had each our own tiny patch of ground to cultivate, and we bought little plants to put into them; the polyanthus is associated in my mind with this epoch, and the eschscholtzia, which, however, I avoided, for its virulent orange flowers, and its strange glabrous stalks with their thin milky juice, inspired me with ineffaceable repulsion. My mother was always fond of flowers and gardens and orchards—though she scarcely seems to have been much influenced by this love in her choice of houses—and often spoke of the great garden and orchard at Leyton in which her childhood had been passed. A cottage in the country with a large garden remained her unfulfilled ideal to the last. It has been left to me to attain.

An incident which occurred in this garden may be recorded because, simple as it was, it is unique in my life. It was probably about a year after my return to England, and my mother had gone to be with my father, I think at Hamburg. I was swinging myself in the swing when I heard, with perfect distinctness, my mother's voice twice calling me by name. I believe I ran to the servant to ask if she had called, but with the usual secretiveness of childhood I kept the experience to myself. I have never had any other hallucination of this sort in the course of my life.

I believe, however, that children are nearer than adults to the threshold of hallucination. In this belief I am confirmed by another experience which belongs to this period of my childhood at Addiscombe. A boy cousin of about the same age was spending a few days with us and slept in my bed. Sometimes in the morning we would lie on our stomachs, burying our faces in the pillows, and see visions. These visions—I do not know which of us originated the experiment—were somewhat of the same kind, though less vivid, as those I have since learnt to see on the curtain of the eyelids under the influence of mescal buttons and resembled still more the hypnagogic visions one is specially liable to see at night after a fatiguing day. The remarkable point was that our visions were to some extent under the influence of suggestion; the same series appeared to both of us and we would note aloud any change which then became visible to the other observer. These visions caused no surprise or questioning to either of us, but I cannot recall their occurrence at any other time.

When I was about nine years old we moved from Addiscombe to a smaller house at Wimbledon, or rather the low-lying district between Wimbledon and Merton. They are both interesting places, but the intermediate region, between Wimbledon Station and Merton Station, was of no interest, and we occupied a house in an unattractive terrace in an unattractive road, which I now find it difficult to recognise, so changed has all this region become. My mother sent me as a day-scholar during the next three years to a school called the French and German College opposite old Merton Church. The house is now slowly being dissolved, if it has not completely gone, but it was a fine old mansion, partly of the Elizabethan age, which deserved a better fate. One entered the house, though not the school, by the great finely designed iron gates, after clanging a loud bell, and approached a low but very broad house with two wings, and beyond to the left, the schoolhouse with various farm buildings and out-houses; the whole was surrounded by a high wall which also enclosed a large garden. I have never been able to learn the ancient history of the house; in fairly recent times it was said to have been once the home of Sheridan; I find no support for this story in the biographies of Sheridan, but it is clear at all events that Garrick once stayed at Merton, and there was a little old theatre attached to the house, in my time transformed into a combined swimming-bath and gymnasium, though still recognisable as a theatre.

The school was entitled to rank as fairly good. I do not know that any of my schoolfellows attained distinction, but a boy who was there before my time, Robert Buchanan, acquired fame in literature during my youth, and later, it so chanced, was, as he wrote me, an admirer of my own early literary work, though neither of us was aware of this link of connection. Another boy, rather before my time, later achieved notoriety by becoming an itinerant organ-grinder and claiming the title of Viscount Hinton. These two careers probably owed as little as mine—although all three were unconventional—to De Chastelain, the principal of the school, a pale compact little man of French descent, though completely anglicised, who made a competent and energetic headmaster, maintaining his authority with a touch of sarcasm. It was he who first noted the peculiarities of my hand-writing. He would ask me if I wrote with the kitchen poker, and sometimes remark that I seemed to keep a tame spider to race over the page. But I knew little intimately of De Chastelain, for being a day-boy and one of the youngsters I stood rather outside the inner life of the school, if it had any. I am afraid that De Chastelain made an unfavourable personal impression on me because I had acquired the idea that he ill-treated his wife, a rather pretty American with a low voice and a faded crushed air. This was probably the earliest occasion on which I conceived, without realising it, a championship of woman's rights. My schoolfellows, so far as I know, felt not the slightest interest in her. To me it was her seeming pathos that appealed; her age, about thirty I suppose, was far too advanced for me to feel the smallest romantic attraction, for though up to the age of about twenty-three such attraction, when I felt it, was nearly always towards women four or five years older than myself, no greater interval of years was possible. I scarcely remember that I ever exchanged two words with her. I do remember, however, that she once reported me to her husband as having passed her in the street without lifting my cap; my "manners" were set down in the next quarterly report home as "passable." I mention this little episode as the earliest proof known to me of the existence of a trait which has marked me throughout life. Absorbed in my own dreams, all my life long I have passed by without seeing—and frequently, even when seeing, not recognising—people who are perfectly well known to me. I have even passed my own sweetheart who had come to seek me, and who let me pass, not revealing that incident to me until years afterwards. Yet I have sometimes been considered very observant, for attention and observation are capricious and partial, dependent on the interest of the moment, or on one's instinctive permanent interests, so that there may be things one never fails to see though nearly all other persons may fail to see them.

I remained at the French and German College until I was twelve. The years I spent there were almost altogether uneventful, and so far as they were eventful the school counted for nothing. I learned a little Latin and more French; I played a little cricket without the slightest zest, and duly took my part in all other games. I was occasionally invited with one or two selected boys to join in a game of croquet with De Chastelain's friends on the lawn. I looked on in the little theatre while the boarders used the trapeze or learnt to swim. I was on entirely good terms with my schoolfellows without making any intimate friends. Some of them were much elder than I was, but they were a good-natured set; there were no bullies among them, nor did I ever see or hear the slightest hint of any schoolboy vice. The nearest approach to any impropriety I came across was in one of the masters whose admiration was excited by two pretty young dressmakers, sisters, who went to Merton Church, and he asked me to take a letter to one of them at her home. I refused; it evidently seemed to my youthfully virtuous mind too much like encouraging an intrigue, and probably I should think so still; he bore me no grudge. This same master was the first adult man I had seen naked; it was in the swimming-bath, and the vision—I can still recall it—of the sexual organs struck me as ugly, almost repulsive. I expect I appeared a quiet, rather shy boy, of average ability and rather commonplace character. De Chastelain, acute man of the world, would probably have been surprised to learn that I was ever to be heard of outside my own parish. In after years, I sometimes had the vanity to wish to call upon him, but when in middle age I at length paid a pious visit to Merton, De Chastelain and his school, and his family, had all long vanished. I knew not whither. At the age of twelve I left the College for good, without joy and without regrets.

My real self was already emerging, but it was discovering itself along lines that I never revealed at school and could never even dream of revealing. I have already said that my love of reading—it was almost a passion in those days—had appeared at an early age. During the years I was at Merton College reading was my constant delight during all my spare hours and moments. In the holidays it was only with difficulty that my mother, anxious for my health, drove me out of the house for solitary walks in the dreary suburb that contained nothing that appealed to me—except a little when I wandered as far as Wimbledon Common—and I abridged these walks to the lowest limit. Our house bookcase was not too wellsupplied with the kind of literature I needed, though it contained all the early volumes of the Penny Magazine (inherited from my grandfather Ellis) rich with varied miscellany, notably the old English ballads, including the Robin Hood cycle, for my instruction and delight, and other good books like Cowper's poems and Scott's Marmion. My taste was fairly omnivorous, though I rejected sermons and books of religious edification, with which the bookcase swarmed. But I found here, as first published serially in a religious periodical, that gracious and beautiful book, Mrs. Charles's Chronicles of the Schönberg-Cotta Family, and derived from it a kind of unconscious artistic pleasure.

I discovered another source of literary enjoyment in the drawers of a huge old bureau-sideboard. Here were stowed away and neglected by all save me a number of books that had belonged to my grandmother and had in them the simple book-plate "Susannah Oliver." They dated from before her marriage, half a century earlier, and they bore witness to her fine and varied taste. Here were all the volumes of Nature Displayed, a conspectus of the whole realm of Nature, doubtless meant for popular use yet with no sacrifice of scientific honesty and precision; it was full of beautiful plates, and I spent many hours poring over it with minute attention. There are no such books now, for modern taste supposes that "popular science" must be made easy and vague and sentimental and prudish, but for my part, when I was ten years old much as now when I am sixty years old, I wanted truth presented to me as it is, arduous and honest and implacable. There was, however, a scientific book of quite another sort which I read with pleasure, the first edition, in many volumes, of Maria Edgeworth's Harry and Lucy. It is a forgotten book now, even by those who rightly admire Maria Edgeworth, but, I imagine, it may well have been the first attempt to bring the elements of science attractively to children. It is written with vivacity and though I only read it once and spent no long time over it I can clearly recall some of its scenes still. Here also I found Rousseau's Rêveries d'un promeneur solitaire. It was the first French book I ever read for my own pleasure, and I felt its haunting romantic music. This was probably my earliest intimation of what style means. Not the least precious of these books was to me Rowlandson's Dr. Syntax in Search of the Picturesque. I was never weary of those pictures, and it may well have been through the genius of Rowlandson—though I must not forget the carefully studied papers of Mrs. Jameson on Italian art, in the Penny Magazine and their illustrations delicately worked over in colours by my grandfather—that I first began to attain an insight into art. That volume is the only one of my grandmother's books that I have succeeded in preserving. All the rest melted away by use or in moving from house to house, especially during my absence in Australia, and the like happened to a large number of the rare—as they would now be—and beautiful curios my father brought from time to time from many lands, enough to make an exquisite little museum had they all been carefully preserved. But I have a few of these also, above all a Buddha, one of two which a soldier at Rangoon brought as loot one day to the ship (in which my father had transported troops for the Burmese war) and wanted to know what my father would give for them. He offered a very worn copy of one of Marryat's novels. The offer was accepted. Now a Hindu gentleman who lately saw my Buddha tells me it is of thirteenth-century style, and that if I ever feel disposed to return it to India he will come over to escort it.

In addition to these books I read with care about this time a great many serious modern books, such as Macaulay's Essays, which I had selected as a birthday present, and annotated in a critical spirit since my parents were somewhat Conservative in political tendency, and I had so far developed no political or social ideas of my own. Nowadays it is often a difficult matter for me to read at all since my mind at once begins to work vigorously on every statement set before it; every touch now puts innumerable circuits of thought and emotion and expression into action. But at that time my mind was an empty treasure-house into which every precious thing I could find was eagerly poured. I bought cheap editions of Milton and Burns and religiously read them through at the age of twelve, though as yet with no great relish. Longfellow, whom I also bought in a corresponding sixpenny edition, was the first poet to make a profound and intimate impression upon me. Here for the first time, especially in the more lyrical poems, I seemed to hear a living voice which spoke to me in the language of my own heart. Longfellow was, as it were, the sweet friend of my early boyhood, the only friend I then possessed with whom I could privately commune. My love for him was later submerged in a mightier love for Shelley—though in the first tempestuous spring of adolescence I revelled in the intoxicating poetry of Alexander Smith's Life-Drama and Mrs. Browning's Aurora Leigh—but there always remained with me, long after I outgrew his poems, a tender memory for that first friend of wistful and pensive puberty. No other writer so well expressed in my day the ideas and emotions of that period.

The prose author who in those days held me most absolutely enthralled was Scott. I suppose I was about ten when my mother took us for a summer holiday to Shanklin in the Isle of Wight. She asked the landlady if she had any books to lend me to read, and the original edition of Woodstock was by a happy chance produced. I cannot say that I fell at once under the magician's spell—that is not my way and Woodstock is not one of the best of the Waverley novels—but I was certainly eager to read more books of the same author, and very soon all my small pocket-money (I am not sure that my regular allowance yet exceeded a penny or twopence a week) was devoted to the gradual purchase of Scott's novels in the sixpenny edition. Here was a vast world, indeed a whole succession of worlds, in which I lost my own personality, and lived, with never a critical pang, a life of absolute and pure enjoyment. I delighted more or less in all of them, but those that were most remote in time and place fascinated me most, though not really the finest, because they opened the largest vistas to imagination, and Ivanhoe seemed to me the most perfect, while none of them made so intimate an appeal to me as The Abbot, with its romance of Mary Queen of Scots and the charming figure of Catherine Seyton with whom I fell hopelessly in love. My pocket-money could not keep pace with my insatiable thirst for these wonderful books, and the favourites I would read, reread, and read once again, when novelties ran short. This went on with vigour that but slowly flagged for several years, until I was sixteen and had just reached Australia to begin life on my own account. I was passing through religious struggles which had sharpened the accuracy of my critical faculty, and my interests were at the same time being diverted into other altogether different channels. Scott's brilliant stage lost its glamour; the machinery seemed to creak. I was behind the scenes and could see how tawdry the machinery often was.

While my capacious appetite for literature enabled me to devour from end to end some very serious books, I also read with pleasure some boys' books of travel and adventure. At some not very early date also, I came upon an old sea chest of drawers of my father's which contained, with some less attractive literature, an illustrated edition of Robinson Crusoe and translations of some navigators' narratives, notably those of La Pérouse. (I already knew a book of missionary experiences in the Pacific with coloured illustrations, which fixed on my mind a permanent ideal of those islands, scarcely intended by the author, long before I knew Typee.) These books, I remember, were stained with age, and soaked in the fragrance of the wood of the chest, exhaled by many voyages across the tropics, and this added to their exotic charm. I was at the College at Merton, and probably about ten or eleven years old, when I passed through a literary experience which may seem surprising in a boy who was reading, or about to read, Milton and Macaulay. I was introduced by a schoolfellow to The Boys of England, a penny weekly, full of extravagantly sensational and romantic adventures in wild and remote lands. The fascination with which this literature held me was a kind of fever. It was an excitement which overwhelmed all ordinary considerations. My mother forbade me to read these things, but, though I usually obeyed her, in this matter I was disobedient without compunction. Mr. De Chastelain once detected me reading The Boys of England in school hours; during solitary rambles I read it as I walked; every spare moment, when alone, it was in my hands. But the fever subsided as suddenly as it arose—probably it only lasted a few weeks—and left not a trace behind. It is an experience which enables me to realise how helpless we are in this matter. If this is the literature a boy needs nothing will keep him away from it; if he needs more than ever it can give it will leave no mark on him. So far as I remember, The Boys of England was innocent enough though full of wild and extravagant action. It is doubtless in its appeal to the latent motor energies of developing youth that its fascination lies.

My demand to make literature, as apart from reading it, I can scarcely trace the beginning of. At an early age I would buy penny notebooks, some of which I still possess, and in these I entered, in a large childish hand, the record of the occurrences of my life that chiefly interested me, together with the dates when I read particular books, and extracts from them of passages which struck me. These notebooks slowly became more elaborate. I began to index them and to co-ordinate the quoted passages under a few headings. In fact the literary methods I later followed were already growing up slowly and spontaneously, without the slightest stimulus or assistance from outside, at the age of ten. By the age of twelve I had prepared a little book for publication. It was called The Precious Stones of the Bible. It contained nothing original but was an orderly compilation of all the facts on the subject I could bring together from the small supply of books at my disposition. By this time, however, I was beginning to acquire a library of my own, aided by rather skilful bargaining—sale, purchase and exchange—in the advertisement columns of The Exchange and Mart. In this way I secured a number of bound volumes of an old miscellany of instructive character called The Visitor, which proved a source of useful information. I wished to publish my little book, and my mother, who, without encouraging me, took a sympathetic interest in my literary activities, was willing to help. In my innocence I supposed that the most economical plan would be to print as few copies as possible, and decided to have only twelve. On applying to a large City printing firm it appeared that the cost would be £12, and the scheme dropped. When I look back now at that little book I seem to see in it the germ of my later books, I mean those of more scientific character; then, as now, it was my desire to accumulate with an open mind all the information I could acquire and present it in a fair, orderly, and attractive way, though I could not then, as I have since learnt to do, in that act create afresh a form that my own spirit had moulded. In its elements this method, I can now recognise, is that of the East Anglian mind with which my own must largely be identified, the method of Ray, the method which Bacon illuminated with the flame of genius. It is a natural history method, a method to which some would deny the name of science, and it has always been my instinct to be a natural historian of the soul, so that it interested me once when Dr. Davenport, the distinguished American biologist, told me that I seemed to him the only Englishman who had applied natural history methods to psychology.

I planned another book, on flowers, and I accumulated much material on trees. These studies remained literary, not scientific; whether jewels or flowers or trees, I failed at that time, in a way that now seems strange to me, to develop any ardour for studying them in nature. The impulse to handle and explore the actual thing, whether material or psychic, only developed slowly within me during the following twenty years, until now the thing that I cannot come in close contact with has little interest for me.

I also wrote a number of short miscellaneous essays on various topics. Here I had more scope for the development of a personal style and was already unconsciously feeling after a rhythm of my own, at this time rather redundant and rhetorical, as, I remember, my mother once pointed out to me. I would like to read these little essays aloud, and the most obvious way of doing so seemed to me to regard them as sermons and to preach them to the congregation of my young sisters, using the head of the sofa as a pulpit. Doubtless this was the first manifestation of my hereditary ecclesiasticism, not, I suppose, the last, for it is but a few years since that I read in a review by a brilliant woman critic that there is the atmosphere of Cranford around even my most daring books, and though I have never read Cranford I understand that the atmosphere in question is of pious clericalism.

Neither in form nor substance were these childish writings original. Their interest is as a clue to my genuine literary temperament. I proceeded throughout from native instinct and without the slightest stimulus or example to impel me along the path I was taking. I had never met an author; people of that kind were completely unknown in my family circle and never mentioned. No one I knew would have dreamt of holding up an author as worthy of my imitation. It was not, moreover, until long afterwards that I realised that authorship is a possible means of livelihood. Indeed, in a sense, I never have so looked upon it. I am quite pleased to make my living by what I write, but the attempt to write for my living would be hopeless, for I can write nothing that is not in itself a pleasure to me to write.

My early literary adventures revealed a preoccupation with the Bible. Just as all my germinal artistic and scientific aptitudes went into writing, so all my early emotional activity went into religion. From our earliest years my mother brought us up religiously. She was so profoundly and sincerely religious herself, in the old Evangelical manner, that it was inevitable she should. Such early and constant familiarity with the Bible and the Prayer Book, and a regular attendance at church services, whether or not it inspires religious emotion, certainly promotes religious knowledge, and the imagery of the Bible, the phrases and cadences of the Prayer Book, which glide so easily into my mind and into my writings, date back to my childhood. For strong emotion, however, the shock of sudden external stimulus is necessary. I cannot definitely recall how this shock cane to me, but I am fairly certain that it was through the remarkable personality of the Rev. John Erck, the Vicar of Merton at that time. Old Merton Church, though immediately opposite the College, was not the nearest church to our house. But my mother was always accustomed to choose the church that suited her and not that which happened to be nearest. Erck—an Irishman, a man of good family and some property—was an example of the so-called Celt, short and erect, with black hair, sallow complexion, and dark glowing eyes. He had all the perfervid oratorical and emotional genius of his race, and a thousand years earlier might have been among the Irish missionary saints. A shy, silent man in daily life, who walked straight ahead, with his forearm carried at his back, looking neither to right nor left, in the pulpit he was transformed. I have heard many famous preachers—Liddon and Stanley and Spurgeon and Parker—but never one who possessed so fine a natural eloquence as this man, an eloquence in which passionate sincerity blended with poetic imagination, wholly guided, it seemed, by the inspiration of the moment and yet always the instinct of the artist. I remember him vividly enough to believe that if I were to hear him now my opinion would still be the same. He had a beautiful voice with a wide range between the high and the low tones, and he would modulate this voice with a skill and effect which in a popular preacher must soon have become a self-conscious affectation, but in this unappreciated country parson of a quiet village seemed altogether natural. There come back to me the summer evenings in the dim church—it was only in the evening that his eloquence was fully revealed and when dusk came on the lights were not lit—and the stream of Irish eloquence that rose and fell over the heads of those prim and stolid Anglo-Saxon villagers. I well remember, on the sudden death by a fall from F his horse of Bishop Wilberforce—a diocesan whose exceeding personal charm had won the heart of the Low Church Vicar—with what impassioned eloquence Erck preached on the Elijah who had been suddenly swept to the clouds in a chariot of fire; and how again, in a very different mood, having apparently found that the tradesmen of his parish were not above the trick of giving false measure, he preached a fierce sermon on this subject: "People of Merton, repent!" Perhaps more than by his sermons I was moved by Erck's exquisite way of reading the lessons and especially the prayers. He would sometimes subtly graduate and slowly deepen his voice through the various collects of Evensong, and the low and grave tones with which at length he reached "Lighten our darkness" still linger in memory. These influences enabled me to understand something of the reality of the Bible and the beauty of the English Prayer Book, and so to some extent counteracted the dulling effect of familiarity with these things when imposed as a task in early life.

Erck left Merton, I believe, a few years after we left the neighbourhood, disheartened, I understand, by the lack of sympathy, and became English Chaplain at Pisa during long years. He is still alive when I write this, in 1905, living at Brighton, and now when I re-write these pages in 1921 I can add that he died at an advanced age, and that when I visited Merton Church a few years ago I noted with pleasure a brass tablet set up on the wall to his memory.*

[* Perhaps it was set up by his wife. Still later (I now write in 1930) I note in The Times her death, also in Brighton, a few miles from where I am now living, at the great age of 100.]

A certain part of the religious and semi-religious influence of Merton Church upon my young and sensitive mind emanated from the building itself. I never knew its history—I sometimes sought to imagine it, though I knew that Merton had a part in ancient history. The churches I had been familiar with before were modern and uninteresting; this, though small and of no great architectural worth, possessed the charm and beauty of antiquity. The ancient monuments, the old helmet that hung aloft over the reading-desk, the row of blazoned escutcheons and their mottoes—In Coelo Quies and the rest—these things vaguely and often stirred my ignorant imagination. The love of old buildings, especially old churches, which has become so strong with me since, certainly began to make itself felt at Merton.

Underlying my interest in the external aspects of religion there was really a personal and intimate kernel. What, if any, intellectual or dogmatic conceptions I attached to religion I cannot recollect; doubtless they were only those I was taught. But at one time I constantly carried a little Testament in my pocket; I studied it devoutly; I was, moreover, seriously anxious to do right, and firmly resolved to train myself in the paths of righteousness. I recall one incident that seems characteristic. I had found among old neglected books in the house a little manual on self-education by, I think, a Mrs. Hope, and a list of faults was herein presented in a tabular form, the author recommending the use of such a table for entering a mark against each fault every time it was committed. I copied out the table for my own use and began duly to follow the instructions. Before long, however, I found that it was often difficult to be quite sure about the definition of one's faults and also realised that, in any case, the proceeding was unprofitable. I folded up the table of my faults and slipped it down between the boards of my bedroom floor. Maybe it rests there still.

All these little experiences, it must be noted, I went through strictly with myself. I had then in a high degree, as I have always had more or less since—though as one grows old and detached from the world it is less rather than more—an instinctive secretiveness in intimate emotional matters, an almost unconquerable impulse to keep my own personal life to myself. I never desired to take, and certainly never dreamed of taking, any person into my confidence in these matters of religious edification and moral improvement. It must be said that I was, at this age, in all respects a "good" boy; whether or not the vices of boyhood are virtues in disguise, I certainly had no trace of them; but I was not a goody-goody boy, for it would have been horror to me for anyone to suspect my inner feelings.

So far I have said nothing of my sexual life. On the physical side there was really nothing to say until I had passed boyhood and reached adolescence. There were no spontaneous sexual manifestations, and no companion, no servant girl, ever sought to arouse such phenomena, or to gratify curiosities that before puberty had not come into being. Indeed, strange as it may appear to some, throughout the whole course of my school-days until they ended at the age of sixteen, I cannot recall that I heard or saw anything that would have shocked an ordinarily modest schoolgirl. The incident there was to tell merely shows my innocence.

In recent years I have sometimes looked back at my childhood to observe how it appears in the light of modern views of the more subtle mechanism of sex and its manifestations and repressions in childhood. That much may thus be revealed I am now well aware by my own investigations on others. One cannot fail to find something significant when one turns to explore, in this new light, the child one has known most intimately. A central fact about myself seems to be demonstrated by the incident to which I have just referred. In childhood I was not sexually excitable. It seems to me that, however numerous the exceptions, this complete sexual latency in the pre-pubertal period is probably the rule. But I am not here concerned to generalise, nor am I prepared to assert that I was myself either as child or adult completely normal; on the contrary, I was from the first—beneath a reserved and impassive surface—a highly nervous and sensitive person. I was in some degrees, perhaps, what may be called an "introverted" child; my timidity, my self-consciousness and self-criticism perhaps drove me in on myself, not, however, towards daydreaming, which only began at puberty, but to books. (My wife, as a child, by a more profound sense of inferiority—for those around her took pleasure in making her aware of her small size, her lack of beauty, and her naughtiness—was driven to the opposite extreme of rebellious and energetic selfassertion, and so became an "extraverted" child.) There were no sexual emotions and not even any sexual curiosities at this period. I remember that at some time—I cannot remember when—I considered the question of the origin of babies and decided that they emerged from their mothers' navels, but this was to me a purely scientific question which involved no morbid feelings, nor any undue attention. I was, again, affectionately devoted to my mother, but quite calmly and undemonstratively, without at any time the slightest touch of excess or any cravings for the manifestation of love in her, or any curiosities, and without, also, the slightest hostile feeling towards my father. Moreover I shared the curious, reserved, critical aloofness which most children feel towards their parents. I am at the same time able to believe that my mother exerted some moulding influence on my later sexual life—and that this would have been much greater if, as never happened, she had allowed her love for me to become unduly tender—but, as it was, her chief influence lay in unconsciously moulding my ideal of womanhood generally.

The question arises whether this seeming absence of sexual phenomena in childhood may not be due to deliberate repression or automatic suppression of such phenomena into the unconscious. If so, they ought when thus repressed or suppressed to give some sign in disorder of the conscious life; but there seem no such signs. Something more, however, I now see, remains to be said. There was no occasion for such repression or suppression. There was no need for it, not entirely because there was nothing to put away, but because the veil of impassive reserve with which I concealed the whole of my intimate personal life rendered repression or suppression completely superfluous. Beneath the veil I was free to think or to feel what I liked; there was no one to say me nay and I saw no reason for saying nay to myself. This fact now seems to me of immense significance for the whole of my life; it is, from one point of view, the key to all my work and my while attitude towards the world. I have never repressed anything. What others have driven out of consciousness or pushed into the background, as being improper or obscene, I have maintained and even held in honour. It has become wrought into the texture of my whole work. Cultured and intelligent people have privately said of my work that it is quite right but should not have been written and published. If I had acted according to their ideas I should have remained as dumb and as obscure as they remained. What I have done has been less perhaps the outcome of deliberate resolve than the expression of an instinct, only now becoming clear to me. That same impulse is expressed in my whole attitude towards the world, in what may be called my philosophy, if by that word one may mean no accepted system but the manifestation of one's personal attitude towards the universe. I have from the first, beneath my concealing veil, been natural; and so I am naturally one with Nature and intimately and essentially in harmony with the course of the universe. It was not until I was nineteen that I became consciously aware of that harmonious union, but the immense satisfaction that the discovery gave me was a sufficient proof of what my real nature had been from the first.

I have said that probably in childhood I was sexually normal. But I think I can trace a slight fibre of what, if possibly normal in childhood, is commonly held—though this I doubt, since I have found it so common—not to be so when it persists or even develops after puberty. I mean a slight strain of what I may call urolagnia, which never developed into a real perversion nor ever became a dominant interest, and formed no distinguishable part of the chief love interests of my life. It was not a recognisable emotional interest in childhood, but the clearness with which several small incidents from that period stand out in memory seems to indicate that it was of some interest to me. To this in later childhood a more scientific interest, possibly my earliest scientific interest, was added when I observed the differences in vesical energy among my schoolfellows, my own being below the average, and began to measure it exactly as private opportunities offered. Many years afterwards I continued these observations and published the results in a paper on "The Bladder as a Dynamoineter" in the American Journal of Dermatology, May, 1902. Later my vision of this function became in some degree attached to my feeling of tenderness towards women—I was surprised how often women responded to it sympathetically—and to my conception of beauty, for it was never to me a vulgar interest, but, rather, an ideal interest, a part of the yet unrecognised loveliness of the world, which we already recognise in fountains, though fountains, it is now asserted, have here had their origin. It would be easy to over-rate the importance of this interest. But it is necessary to note it.*

[* I may be regarded as a pioneer in the recognition of the beauty of the natural act in women when carried out in the erect attitude, and it is described in the passage of my Impressions and Comments which some critics consider my best piece of prose, as well as in an early sonnet entitled "Madonna," while for the more scientific side my study "Undinism" is the first serious discussion of the whole subject. But Rembrandt preceded me. There is a fine and admired picture of his in the National Gallery (No. 54) of a woman standing in a pool and holding up her smock, with parted legs, in an attitude which has always seemed to me undoubtedly to represent the act of urination. In recent years I have learnt on good authority that so it really came from the artist's hands, but that, at some later date (whether or not before it reached the National Gallery in 1836) the falling stream was painted out. The picture is dated 1634, and experts now consider that it probably represents Hendrickje Stoffels, the charming and beloved figure whom, about that time, Rembrandt painted in various intimate situations. I should like to think that the indignation I feel at this sacrilegious distortion of a supreme artist's work will some day be generally shared.]

In later years, I would now further note, it has seemed to me that I may have inherited this trait from my mother, whose early love of water I have already referred to. Once at the age of twelve she took me to spend the day at the London Zoological Gardens. In the afternoon as we were walking side by side along a gravelled path in a solitary part of the Gardens, she stood still, and soon I heard a very audible stream falling to the ground. When she moved on I instinctively glanced behind at the pool on the path, and my mother, having evidently watched my movements, remarked shyly: "I did not mean you to see that." I accepted the incident simply and naturally. Much later in life, recalling the episode—I remembered it clearly, so it must have made an impression on my mind—I realised that my very truthful mother's remark could not be taken at its face value. Nothing would have been easier than to step on the grass, where detection might possibly have been avoided, or to find a pretext for sending me a few yards off, or to enter a Ladies Room. Her action said clearly: "I meant you to see that." To-day I probably understand it better than she herself could. No doubt there was a shy alarm as to what her now tall serious boy would think of this new experience with his mother, but there was also the impulse to heighten a pleasurable experience by blending with it the excitement of sharing it with her son. There was evidently a little touch of exhibitionism, the added pleasure of mixing a private and slightly improper enjoyment with the presence of a beloved male person, for a mother is always a little in love with her first-born and only son. Every woman who has a streak of what I have called Undinism will understand the fascination of this emotion on the threshold of intimacy. Her real feeling would have been better stated as: "I loved you to see, but I didn't want you to see if you would have been disgusted." On the next occasion, some time later, there was no longer any shyness and she confided in me beforehand. We had just had dinner at an Exhibition and, as there were people strolling about, this time she really took some precautions. She stood on the grass, and before she had finished walked on a few paces and copiously recommenced, while I spontaneously played a protective part and watched to see that no one was approaching. When in much later life I mentioned this experience to Louie, my sister, she assured me that our mother had always been extremely reserved with the girls in regard to this function, and remarked, after consideration: "She was flirting with you!" I could add various significant details which now confirm for me the presence in my mother of this trait, such as the habit of urinating on her hand, which, she confided to me, was good for the skin but, I doubt not, found pleasureable. I remember, too, that, earlier, when I was about nine or ten, she once thrust suddenly in my face the hot wet diaper she had just removed from the baby, a mischievous little trick played on her serious son, but also, I now think, with latently in it the challenge to accept this function as natural and sweet. I turned my face away in disgust but I perhaps understand her better now.

I should add that there was not on my part any impulse of curiosity such as young boys sometimes manifest with regard to their mothers, and when, as sometimes happened, she called me into her room in the morning to wash her bared back, I had no impulse to exceed the mission assigned to me. There was an awe in my affection for her which would have prevented even the feeling of curiosity. But it seems significant that I remember clearly these as well as other incidents, earlier in life, when the subject of urination was presented to me in connection with women, though such incidents had no apparent effect on me. It was not until the age of sixteen that this trait became a conscious and active, though always a subordinate, element in my mind. It can hardly, therefore, be considered either the persistence of an infantile impulse or a regression. It proved of immense benefit to me, for it was the germ of a perversion and it enabled me to understand sympathetically the nature of perversions. On the emotional side, also, it has been a more or less latent element in that tender sympathy with women which, as I have come to realise, they so greatly appreciate.

Love comes normally to a child through what we call the soul rather than through the body. In this and, indeed, throughout—with whatever wide variations from the most common types—I was normal. The young boy's love is a spiritual passion generated within by any stray spark from the real world, and so far as his own consciousness extends, even without any sensory, still less any sensual, elements whatever, easy as it might be to detect such elements. A chance encounter of life sets free within him a vision which has danced within the brains of his ancestors to remote generations and has no relation whatever to the careless girl whose playful hand opens the dark casement that reveals the universe.

I was twelve years old, and the summer holidays, after my last term at Merton College, had just begun. Half a century earlier (as I discovered five years afterwards in Australia when reading his attractive Autobiography), at the same age, in this same village of Merton, a man of letters more famous than I am ever likely to be, Leigh Hunt, had met his first love. Here I was now to meet mine.

My mother, though on occasion hospitable, cared little to have strangers staying in the house; a girl or boy cousin would sometimes be invited to spend a week, and left no impress on my imagination. The first stranger not of my kin to stay in the house was a girl of sixteen, the only daughter of my mother's step-brother, who was in a well-to-do position. Agnes, then, for that was her name, was invited to spend a summer week or two with us at Wimbledon in 1871. She was a dark pretty vivacious girl, with long black ringlets, of something the same type, I can now see, as her grandmother, the second Mrs. Wheatley, whom I distinctly remember. Old enough to be a woman in my eyes, and yet young enough to be a comrade and equal, she adapted herself instinctively to the relationship and won my heart immediately. I took not the slightest liberty with her, and never had the slightest impulse to do so, but she, on her part, treated me with an easy familiarity which no woman had ever used with me before, and that fact, certainly, though its significance was then beyond me, undoubtedly had its influence. She would play and romp with me in all innocent unreserve, and when we went out together for long walks, as often happened, she would sometimes make me offer her my arm and treat her as a lady, then again asserting her superiority by treating me to lemonade and at the best places she could find. One day as we strolled arm in arm through the poppied cornfields which then lay between Merton Station and the College—it was in these fields that I first knew the beauty of poppies—my severe little schoolmaster suddenly came round the corner on to us. Timid though I habitually seemed, I raised my cap without flinching or withdrawing my arm under my master's stern eye, and have ever since prided myself on that early little act of moral courage. He doubtless smiled to himself at thus seeing a handsome girl hanging on his quiet pupil's arm, and he subsequently asked my father who she was, but without, I think, mentioning that detail. Agnes returned home, and, strangely enough, I have never seen her since. I lent her Keats's Poems when she left and she lent me The Wide, Wide World; we exchanged a few notes but our correspondence speedily withered, without protest on my part, and probably aided by the fact that, through a trivial circumstance connected with this very visit of Agnes—she had once offered to help in the domestic work and been given some peas to shell which her mother resented as too menial a task for her daughter—a certain permanent coldness developed between her mother and mine, each feeling aggrieved. She is still alive, and though she was even then looking forward to marriage as a near probability (for I heard her talk to our servant to that effect) she still remains single, an only child who has devoted her life to the care of her aged parents.

I never saw Agnes again; I never made any effort to see her; I never mentioned her name; no one knew that I even thought of her. But for four years her image moved and lived within me, revealing myself to myself. I had no physical desires and no voluptuous emotions; I never pictured to myself any joy of bodily contact with her or cherished any sensuous dreams. Yet I was devoured by a boy's pure passion. That she should become my wife—though I never tried to imagine what that meant—was a wild and constant aspiration. I would he awake in bed with streaming eyes praying to God to grant that this might some day be. I have often felt thankful since that our prayers are not heard.

Under the stress of this passion I became a person, and, moreover, in temper a poet. I discovered the beauty of the world, and I discovered a new vein of emotion within myself. I began to write verse. I began to enjoy art, and, at the same time, Nature. In a still vague and rudimentary way, all my literary activities slowly took on a new character. Hitherto they had been impersonal, displaying indeed a certain research, a certain orderly and systematic spirit, perhaps inborn, yet not definitely personal. Now the personal element took shape. The touch of this careless vivacious girl had placed within me a new ferment which began to work through every fibre of my being. It was an epoch-making event in my life, and was soon to be succeeded by another of scarcely less importance.