I can well remember, and as it were visualise, my father in that house, but only on one day of the week――the Sunday. On other days I cannot remember to have seen him at all. But I can recall many details of the house itself, and well remember that the library window looked on to New Street, in which lived our chemist and druggist; and of an evening I would go into the library and climb on a chair to enjoy the glory of his huge coloured bottles in the window, and then meanly pull faces at the nauseous shop in revenge for the wrongs I had suffered at its hands.
My brother and I took our morning walks in Dorset Square. In the early sixties Dorset Square was a vast jungle. Speaking from memory, it contained well-accredited lions and bears in its fastnesses. I saw Dorset Square the other day. It has sadly shrunk. Those giant shrubs that towered over your head, hiding you securely from a distracted nurse, are no longer there. Regent’s Park was my other playground or, rather, that part of it opposite Sussex Terrace called “The Enclosure,” to which we had a right of entrance and a key. I do not know that it is a matter of importance now, but it was of the essence of happiness in those days that our good nurse _ex abundanti cautela_ carried the key of “The Enclosure” in one hand, and my brother and I contested for her other hand, as a prize of great worth. Regent’s Park retains more of its size than Dorset Square, but it is not the illimitable veldt that it was. “The Enclosure” was snobbish, and its snobbery has been very properly curtailed. I well remember how we envied the nurseless urchins in their freedom of the real park across the water. It was on that treacherous lake some forty people were drowned in a terrible ice accident. I remember being hurried out of “The Enclosure” past the tent into which they were carrying the drowned. For many months afterwards there was the draining, levelling, and then the refilling of the lake. All this work I superintended from the banks, and at last watched the water come bubbling up from a huge pipe into the new-made lake with as deep a satisfaction as the chief engineer himself.