care.”

The senior curate bowed, but did not articulate a reply, and my father then handed me once more to the junior. For a moment the latter hesitated, but at the vicar’s request accepted the privilege of concluding my baptism. Later, I have been told, there was a certain amount of argument, in which my father more than held his own, finally absolving the vicar from further sponsorial duties and notifying his decision to transfer his worship elsewhere.

For a man of my father’s position this was a serious step. But it was one that he did not hesitate to take. And within a year, as I have always been proud to remember, he had made himself a sidesman at St. James-the-Lesser-Still, Peckham Rye.

CHAPTER III

My parents’ studies in the upbringing of children. A successful instance of non-vaccination. Further example of my father’s consideration for others. My mother’s ill-health. My parents engage a charwoman. Her appearance and character. Physical characteristics of her son. Deplorable social result of the war. Continued presumption of charwoman’s son. I rebuff him. Affection for grey rabbit. Charwoman’s son’s cannon and the use made of it by him. Scenes of violence, and intervention of my father. Intervention of charwoman. A lethargic vicar. Was he also immoral? My father transfers his worship to St. James-the-Least-of-All.

Apart from the ill-health to which I have previously made reference, but which was punctuated with intervals of comparative well-being, I have always regarded my first five or six years as a particularly fruitful period. At my father’s desire, almost in this case a command, my mother began to study various books on childhood, such as Dr. Brewinson’s Childish Complaints, Mrs. Edward Podmere’s Diet in Infancy, the Reverend Ambrose Walker’s First Steps in Religion, Wilbur P. Nathan’s The Babe and the Infinite, Mrs. Wood-Mortimer’s Clothes and the Young, and Jonathan and Cornwall’s Dictionary of Home Medicine. Each of these, with the exception of the Dictionary, was borrowed in turn from the nearest public library, and it became my mother’s custom to consecrate her afternoon rest hour to the perusal of these volumes.

Apart

According to an arrangement suggested by my father, she would study one chapter each afternoon, or alternatively three and a half pages of the Dictionary of Home Medicine. On his return from work, and after she had washed up the supper dishes—for my father at this time did not employ a 

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