AUTOBIOGRAPHY 3 



traditional account of the manner in which I lost the 

 chance of an endowment of great practical value. The 

 windows of my mother's room were open, in conse- 

 quence of the unusual warmth of the weather. For the 

 same reason, probably, a neighbouring beehive had 

 swarmed, and the new colony, pitching on the window- 

 sill, was making its way into the room when the horri- 

 fied nurse shut down the sash. If that well-meaning 

 woman had only abstained from her ill-timed inter- 

 ference, the swarm might have settled on my lips, and 

 I should have been endowed with that mellifluous elo- 

 quence which, in this country, leads far more surely 

 than worth, capacity, or honest work, to the highest 

 places in Church and State. But the opportunity was 

 lost, and I have been obliged to content myself through 

 life with saying what I mean in the plainest of plain 

 language, than which, I suppose, there is no habit more 

 ruinous to a man's prospects of advancement. 



Why I was christened Thomas Henry I do not know; 

 but it is a curious chance that my parents should have 

 fixed for my usual denomination upon the name of that 

 particular Apostle with whom I have always felt most 

 sympathy. Physically and mentally I am the son of 

 my mother so completely even down to peculiar 

 movements of the hands, which made their appearance 

 in me as I reached the age she had when I noticed 

 them that I can hardly find any trace of my father 

 in myself, except an inborn faculty for drawing, which 

 unfortunately, in my case, has never been cultivated, 

 a hot temper, and that amount of tenacity of purpose 

 which unfriendly observers sometimes call obstinacy. 



My mother was a slender brunette, of an emotional 

 and energetic temperament, and possessed of the most 

 piercing black eyes I ever saw in a woman's head. With 

 no more education than other women of the middle 



