xxv HOME LIFE 



457 



victim in the family were very long, and I looked forward 

 with intense interest to one half-hour after dinner, when he 

 would come up and draw scenes from the history of a re- 

 markable bull-terrier and his family that went to the sea- 

 side in a most human and child-delighting manner. I have 

 seldom suffered a greater disappointment than when, one 

 evening, I fell asleep just before this fairy half-hour, and 

 lost it out of my life. 



In those days he often used to take the three eldest of 

 us out for a walk on Sunday afternoons, sometimes to the 

 Zoological Gardens, more often to the lanes and fields be- 

 tween St. John's Wood and Hampstead or West End. For 

 then the flood of bricks and mortar ceased on the Finchley 

 Road just beyond the Swiss Cottage, and the West End 

 Lane, winding solitary between its high hedges and rural 

 ditches, was quite like a country road in holiday time, and 

 was sometimes gladdened in June with real dog-roses, al- 

 though the church and a few houses had already begun to 

 encroach on the open fields at the end of the Abbey Road. 



My father often used to delight us with sea stories and 

 tales of animals, and occasionally with geological sketches 

 suggested by the gravels of Hampstead Heath. But regular 

 ' shop " he would not talk to us, contrary to the expectation 

 of people who have often asked me whether we did not 

 receive quite a scientific training from his companionship. 



At the Christmas dinner he invariably delighted the 

 children by carving wonderful beasts, generally pigs, out of 

 orange peel. When the marriage of his eldest daughter had 

 taken her away from this important function, she was sent 

 the best specimen as a reminder. 



4 MARLBOROUGH PLACE, Dec. 25, 1878. 



DEAREST JESS We have just finished the mid-day Christmas 

 dinner, at which function you were badly wanted. The inflam- 

 mation of the pudding was highly successful in fact Vesuvian 

 not to say ^Etnaic and I have never yet attained so high a pitch 

 in piggygeriesis as on this occasion. 



The specimen I enclose, wrapped in a golden cerecloth, and 

 with the remains of his last dinner in the proper region, will 

 prove to you the heights to which the creative power of the 



