1883-1896 A MISUNDERSTANDING 611 Bishop said, "Oh, I don't know! very poor stuff, I am afraid (laughing). Seriously, I have not time to prepare, and my speeches are worth nothing; but they seem to like my being there, and will make me say a few words." My father sighed heavily and said, "It is just the same with me, only I haven't the grace even to confess that my speeches are 'stuff.' But I feel sure that they are!" I shall never forget a conversation between the Ambassador of a foreign power and my father. The former was dining at Lambeth, a genial intelligent man, very solicitous to be thoroughly in touch with the social life of the country to which he had been accredited. After dinner, the Ambassador, in full diplomatic uniform, with a ribbon and stars, sitting next my father, said politely, "Does your Grace reside much in the country?" My father said that as Archbishop he was provided with a country-house, and that he was there as much as possible, as he preferred the country to the town. "Now, does your Grace go to Church in the country?" with an air of genial enquiry, turning round in his chair. "Yes, indeed!" said my father, "we have a beautiful church almost in the Park, which the village people all go to." "Yes," said the Ambassador meditatively, "Yes, I always go to Church myself in the country-it is a good thing to show sympathy with religious feeling-it is the one thing which combats Socialistic ideas...I think you are very wise, your Grace, to go." My father said that he felt as if he and the Ambassador were the two augurs as represented in Punch1. "I did my best," said my father, "to persuade him that I was a 1 In Sir John Tenniel's cartoon of 8th of February, 1873: Disralius. "I always wonder, brother, how we chief augurs can meet on the opening day without laughing." Gladstonius. "I have never felt any temptation to the hilarity you suggest, brother: and the remark savours of flippancy." Christian...but he listened to all that I said with a charming expression, implying, 'We are both men of the world, and understand each other.' I am sure he thought that I was speaking diplomatically and in purely conventional language, and that if we had known each other better, I should have thrown off the mask, and avowed myself as free a thinker as he." Of his habits of observation my mother writes: His fondness for birds grew with the years. He was never tired of watching the ways of some fly-catchers which haunted the string-course just outside his dressing-room window at Addington, and he would tell me, almost every morning when I went in to him, the fresh things he had noticed. He was He used to look into His relation to all animals was very remarkable. filled with such a sense of their mystery. the beautiful eyes of our old collie, Watch, and say, "O Watch, I wish you could tell me what you are." A pet parrot of mine which I had tamed used to stir his wonder. It was a fierce bird, but quite under control, and I seldom missed a morning at Addington taking him into the study-my husband would always tempt him on to his finger, and wave him gently about, singing to him as if he was a baby. He had such reverence for the mystery of the animal creation and their dumb relation to us the extraordinary powers they had, and the equally strange and sudden limitations which would block the way. When this same Watch died, my husband had him buried on a lovely grass slope in the garden, under a cedar, and he put up a little stone, with the epitaph "Esne vigil?" to express both the mystery which was so constantly in his mind, the impossibility of thinking that such intelligence and such love could perish at death-" Art thou, Watch ?" "Dost thou exist still?"—and also that the motto should bear a touch of reminder to whoever read it, "Thou, art thou watchful?” He never tired of little devices to remind him of beautiful things; he had little pictures all about his study; sketches of places that he loved were let into the panels of the doors; "he always wanted one sketch," says my sister, 1883-1896 LOVE OF BEAUTY 613 "from every place that we stayed at in the holidays"; a shelf of books of poetry of which he was fond stood close to his sofa, that when he was tired or fretted he might recall himself to lovelier and deeper realities. He was for ever trying to keep the spiritual eye undimmed in the midst of dusty and laborious work; for instance on the box, where he put letters for the post, was written "Ite, ite, veloces angeli!" and gummed to the bottom of one of the drawers of his writing-table, where it can be seen on pulling out the drawer, is a strip of paper thus inscribed: Rule-Not to answer for 24 hours any letters which on any account made his heart beat faster-" asperities soften away, and my view of the writer's meaning gets so much fairer."-BP SUMNER. CHAPTER XVII. DAILY LIFE. "But blame thou not the winds that make The seeming-wanton ripple shake, The tender-pencil'd shadow play." TENNYSON. My father's habits were extraordinarily simple. For many years he never slept more than "five hours and ten minutes" in any night, often not so much; he had trained himself to wake early as a boy, by going to sleep thinking of the face of a clock with the hands pointing to the hour at which he wished to wake, and his sleep was broken by the most vivid and picturesque dreaming. As late as the last month of his life, I recollect his entertaining us with the account of a dream he had had. He dreamt that he was at Trinity College Chapel, about to celebrate the Communion. But on reaching the altar he found a book printed in an unknown language. He said, "I began to read, but could not remember how the sense went, so I kept up some sort of muttering, and the choir sang responses at intervals, while I beckoned to everyone within reach to come to my assistance. At last a grave-looking man like a verger came, and on my pointing out the book to him he said, rather severely, 'Your Grace is not aware that this is one of the days when the Mozarabic liturgy is used.'" These dreams were always strangely vivid; I remember his telling me he had a dream of skeletons, apparently made of gold, 1883-1896 DREAMS. 615 lying in a hollow in the ground which was filled with some opalescent fluid. Again he dreamt that he was passing along a narrow street in some foreign town and saw golden skeletons leaning from the windows. On the skeletons were moving small objects. "This sight," said my father, "inspired me to write verse, and I indited a poem which appeared to me to be very spirited: it began, Oh, not in vain! the poet sings, Forms of things, like earthy worms, Crawl about on forms of things." On one occasion he said that he dreamt that he was at Wellington and a man was shown into his study, who told him that he was a Government Official come down to examine the School. My father said, "I asked him if he would have some lunch; we had just finished our own. He assented, and I took him into the dining-room and then excused myself on the plea that I must see about the examination. I then told the butler to get lunch: then I spent some considerable time in agony at the prospect of a sudden examination; but at last I went back to fetch him. I found the table neatly laid for luncheon: but the Inspector was leaning as far as he could out of the window, to breathe the air: and the only food on the table was two roast ducks in a dish, which were blue with putrefaction." But the most vivid dream of his that I remember was as follows:-"I dreamt," he said, "that I was standing in the cloisters of the Abbey with Dean Stanley, looking at a small cracked slab of slate with letters on it. 'We've found it,' he said. 'Yes,' said I; 'and how do you account for it?' 'Why,' he said, 'I suppose it is intended to commemorate the fact that the animal innocence was not affected by the villainies of the master.' 'Of course,' I replied. The slab I then saw had on it the letters ITI CAPITANI |