filled with such a sense of their mystery. He used to look into 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, "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,

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

and I knew that it was the stone that marked the grave of Titus Oates's horse, and the whole inscription was EQUUS TITI CAPITANI-the 'Captain' referring to the fact that I then also knew that Titus Oates had been a train-band Captain."

Mr Gosse writes:

We were staying at Addington early in 1894, when the appointment to the vacant Laureateship was being discussed. The Archbishop came down to breakfast one morning with a very amusing expression of suppressed mirth, and seemed eager to speak to me alone. He took me after breakfast into the library, and told me that he had had a very vivid dream, in which it appeared that he had been himself appointed Poet Laureate. He said, "I thought that I was standing before the Queen, reciting a poem, and I was very uncomfortable, partly because the Lord Chamberlain had just placed the laurel wreath on my head, and it fell a little over one eye, and partly because I was not at all sure that I ought to be dressed, as I was, in full Archiepiscopal robes. But I tried to forget all that, and concentrate my mind on my poem, and I was getting on nicely with it, when I suddenly woke, and went on, saying out loud :

Your latest atmosphere device

Is all composed of dust and lice.

"Was not that a curious use of the word 'atmosphere,' as an adjective, and what could the rest of the poem have been about?” I replied, "No doubt your Grace had composed a sacred epic on the Plagues of Egypt." We had a good deal of amusement, from time to time, about this and other examples of dreams continued for a moment or two, in vocal but extremely obscure language, after waking. The Archbishop told me at dinner that day, recurring to this subject, of the last time that Magee stayed with him. The two prelates had sat up late together alone, and Magee had been very amusing. In the morning, the Archbishop woke, convulsed with laughter over a joke in Latin which he had been dreaming that Magee had made. He said, "I was so much impressed by the incomparable wit of it, that I jumped out of bed, and wrote it down. But when I had done so, I found there

was no point in it at all, and then, but not till then, I discovered that it was not even in Latin!"

To a later conversation, also about mysterious dream-sayings, the following note-a postscript to a letter-refers.

Another genuine dream-sentence-12 Jan. at waking:"We have long understood her 'case '-that is as Sentias." "Her" refers to Church of England. The speaker is a defender.

To this note, in connection with what the Archbishop had been saying about his anxieties in Madagascar, Armenia and Wales, Mr Gosse replied in the following epigram :— "Past Welsh, Armenian, Malagasy shoals,

All day he navigates the Ship of Light,
Yet, with day-service ill content, controls

Her darkling destinies in dreams at night," which my father read aloud with great amusement at breakfast on the day that he received it.

My father used in former days to rise at 5.30, and after a cold bath, taken all the year round, to make himself tea in an Etna and set to work. He had thus generally done a good deal of work before breakfast, but he had besides read the Greek Testament for an hour or worked at his book on the Revelation. In later years the doctors forbade work before breakfast, but he read a good deal in the Bible, and his dressing used to take him an hour, so that he never rose later than about seven. He used a prie-dieu for his devotions, above which were fixed a triptych, a little illuminated picture, painted after a design of his own, and two little wooden circles painted by himself, with sacred emblems. On a little high desk lay a Theocritus or a book of Greek Epigrams, which he liked to read while dressing, with bullets hung on tape for markers, to keep the pages down.

Breakfast, unless there were many visitors, was at 8.30, an hour which my father regarded as having a peculiar