Ex Libris Henry H. Bucher, Jr. Cat Garlit Bucher The Old Corner Book Store, Inc. Boston, - Mass. THE STORY OF MY LIFE Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2015 V https://archive.org/details/journalofdiscoveOOjohn PHOTO SWAINE, LONDON Sir Harry H. Johnston in 1922 THE STORY OF MY LIFE BY Sir harry H. JOHNSTON ILLUSTRATED FROM PHOTOGRAPHS AND PAINTINGS THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY PUBLISHERS INDIANAPOLIS Copyright, 1923 By The Bobbs Merrill Company Printed in the United States of America PRESS OF BRAUNWORTH & CO. BOOK MANUFACTURERS BROOKLYN, N. Y. THE STORY OF MY LIFE THE STORY OF MY LIFE CHAPTER I I WAS born in the early Saturday morning of June 12, 1858, the eldest child of my mother, Esther Laetitia (Hamilton), and the third son of my father, John Brookes Johnston; at 4 New- ington Terrace, Kennington Park, South London. My father had married his first wife, Annette Cramsie, in 1852. She was the daughter of an Ulster Irishman who had a surname derived, some said, from a French origin — Cramsie, from "Cramoisi." Mr. Cramsie, who had come from a legendary estate known as "Bally Cramsie" (I used to gaze with awe at a hundred-years-old plan thus named, hung up in my step-grandmother's house )^ became in course of time a publisher and newspaper proprietor in Belfast. His wife, my step-grandmother, was a Miss Cross- ley; and after her husband's death had moved to Dublin with those of her children who had not married and gone out into the world. My father was introduced to her when he came over to Dublin about 1850. He fell in love with her daughter Annette, and they were married at Dublin on December 8, 1852, when my father was thirty-three years of age. My grandfather who died in 1865 was John Johnston, for many years a Secretary to the Royal Exchange Assurance Com- pany. My great-grandfather, George Dell Johnston, was born about 1760 and died in 1840; and my great-great-grandfather was John Johnston, a "burgher" of Glasgow, a wool-factor, and at one time a wealthy man who claimed to be descended from an Earl of Annandale. 2 THE STORY OF MY LIFE When the last Marquis of Annandale died in the latter part of the eighteenth century, John Johnston sought to prove his descent from one of the earlier Earls, and consequently his claim not only to that title but to some of the estates. He journeyed to London in the middle of the eighteenth century, and visited Birm- ingham on his way thither. Here he met a Miss Sophia Scott, co-heiress with her sister of considerable Birmingham property. He married her and applied some of her money in trying to prove his Annandale claim. He was not successful and got at last into money difficulties, from which he was relieved by his son George (then an ensign in the 56th Regiment) who sold some land he had inherited on the outskirts of Glasgow and applied some of the money to his father's relief. He is said in the family legends to have obtained thirty thousand pounds by this sale for what — I learned a hundred and ten years later — was valued in the present age at about a million sterling. This George Dell Johnston was a handsome man who fought with distinction at the siege of Gibraltar in 1782. A few years later he came home and married a Miss Author, a Yorkshire woman. He is said to have been very like in appearance to his eldest grandson, my father. After his marriage. Captain George Johnston settled at Enfield, to the north of London, but appar- ently also had some interest or holding in Kensington. He was one of the principal promoters or founders of the Kensington Volunteers, a corps which was represented at the latter end of the nineteenth century by a Middlesex regiment, whose annual regi- mental prizes I distributed about twenty years ago as a faint, far-off echo of my great-grandfather's interest in these civic sol- diers. But in the last part of his life he moved to a house near Kennington Lane, at that time almost in the country to the south of London. In this neighborhood his eldest son, my grandfather, met Louisa Brookes, the daughter of a surgeon, Robert Brookes; married her (in 1817), and in course of time became the parent of eight children, of whom my father — John Brookes Johnston — was the eldest. My grandfather was wont to discredit himself with the repu- THE STORY OF MY LIFE 3 tation of having been rather a wild young man till he married, in order to enhance his later piety. But the wildness can not have gone much beyond mild gambling with cards and an interest in suburban horse-racing. It certainly did not include excess in alcohol, because, curiously enough for those times — the eight- eenth century and beginning of the nineteenth — my Scottish forebears, back, even, traditionally to the Glasgow wool-factor, seem to have had a dislike to alcohol which I have fully inherited. My father till the closing years of his life (when constrained thereto by medical advice) never took wine or spirits, though he kept a good cellar from an instinct of hospitality. My grand- father and his ancestors up to the Glasgow wool-factor were water-drinkers, except on great occasions when they drank wine almost as a religious act. As a family they could not even stomach beer; it produced headaches and other troubles. Per- sonally I liked its taste, though I loathed that of spirits under any label ; just as I delighted in the different flavors and degrees of sweetness or nuttiness of the various wines, but I never could drink more than a small quantity without feeling disagreeably afYected. This family trait in our own section of the Johnston clan/ this inherent dislike of any fermented drink, was almost looked upon as an afHiction a hundred to a hundred and fifty ^ The Johnstons were evidently a most prolific stock. They started, traditionally, with a Norman knight named Jehan or John who offered his services to a king of Scotland in the twelfth century, and was rewarded with lands in Dumfriesshire near the English borders. He built a village there which was called "John's town" (Johnston). His descendants or clansmen to whom a pattern in plaids was assigned, spread far and wide during the succeeding centuries. They extended over Lowland Scotland, entered England in the reign of James I., settled in Southwest Wales — Pembrokeshire — and invaded the north of Ireland under Cromwell and William HI. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries people of this name migrated to the southeastern states of the American Union, and a Johnston was one of the leading Southern generals in the American Civil War (have conversed with the son of this general in Alabama and was struck by his facial resemblance to my relations). Johnstons from Ireland and Scotland engaged in the wine trade with France after 1815. There is now quite a colony of French-speaking Johnstons round about Bordeaux, who for two or more generations have been French subjects and have lost the use of English. In the eighteenth century the spelling of the name varied — sometimes in the same individual — as Johnstone. But the Johnsons — poor souls ! — were quite distinct. 4 THE STORY OF MY LIFE years ago; and I believe was noted pityingly and rather dispar- agingly of my great-grandfather in the army, only to be atoned for by his good looks and courage. He would seem in every way — George Dell Johnston — to have been a pleasant person. But I doubt whether the same could have been said about my grandfather by his contemporaries, though he may have been an upright man of business. He mar- ried in 1817 when he was twenty-seven. Some ten years later he was perturbed over religious questions, as were so many of the middle class in the early nineteenth century. The Napoleonic wars were followed by a period of about twenty years during which there was a great revival of interest in the Christian religion, which in England, throughout the eighteenth century (save for the Wesleyan movement), had faded away into cosy pomps and ceremonies, and in the minds of some great thinkers of Britain, France, Holland, Germany and Italy had ceased to be. Napoleon had restored it officially in France while remaining inwardly a skeptic. In Britain and North Ireland, however, a hundred years ago it had a rebirth. Science was still far too weak to dominate men's minds; and even the greatest thinkers in our land retained an unquestioning faith in the Bible as the Word of God, or at any rate pretended to have done so and confessed their unfaith to no one. Among the notable personages of the day — 1820 to 1860 — was Henry Drummond, the cadet of a Scottish noble house, the head of a great Bank, and intermittently and latterly an M.P. of independent position: pedantic, dogmatic, scholarly, witty, pompous, puerile and obstinate. He really created, molded the sect to which my grandfather lent his support. In the Lowlands of Scotland there had arisen Edward Irving (born in 1792) who in his thirtieth year had been chosen as Presbyterian minister to the Caledonian Church in London, with the Duke of York to hear him in his first London sermon. Although he had a very pronounced squint it does not seem to have provoked ridicule, and is referred to as "a singular obliquity of vision." His appearance is described by contemporaries as THE STORY OF MY LIFE 5 most striking; of an "almost colossal stature, with raven black hair reaching nearly to his shoulders, pale sunken cheeks, an expression of austere pride and conscious sanctity." He seemed a god-like being to my father who first saw him in 1831 and to the end of his own life regarded him as a man of supernormal powers. Henry Drummond came to hear Irving preach, and the two of them — Drummond being the stronger agent after the first few years — fashioned "the Catholic Apostolic Church," and Drum- mond took the leading part in composing its Liturgy. Irving died in December, 1834, at the age of forty-two, appar- ently from phthisis — "consumption" — "a broken-down, worn- out old man, hoary as with extreme age:" broken-hearted, it would almost seem, at not being allowed to marry Jane Welsh, afterwards Mrs. Carlyle.^ He was buried in the crypt of Glasgow Cathedral, after having, nevertheless, been cast out of the Pres- byterian Church for heresies, and in a measure discarded by the adherents of the new Catholic Apostolic Church, born of Irving's sermons. My grandfather was converted to this new and unnamed sect from the first sermon he heard Irving preach in 1831. And my father as a boy of twelve heard the same discourse and obediently followed the conviction of his parents that herein was a great revelation. His recollection of Irving preaching in 1831-1833 in the large studio of Benjamin West, which became the Newman Street Chapel, was intense all through the sixty- three years that followed. At the age of thirteen and fourteen he saw nothing ridiculous or preposterous in the pompous and uninspired exclamations interrupting Irving's discourses from the lips of Henry Drummond,^ from the eccentric prophet, Taplin, or 1 This at any rate was the legend started by Mrs. Oliphant and Mrs. Carl)'le, although it is not easily reconciled with the facts that Irving married a young Scotchwoman (Isabella Martin) in 1823 and had by her a family of several children, one of whom (Mrs. Gardiner) I came to know. 2 For instance, "Look to it — look to it. Ye have been warned ! Ah ! San- ballat, Sanballat, Sanballat, the Horonite, the Moabite, the Ammonite! Ah! confederate, confederate with the Horonite! Ah! look ye to it, look ye to it!" This was the type of Drummond's "inspired" utterances. (See Mrs. Oliphant's Life of Irving.) 6 THE STORY OF MY LIFE from the excitable female, Miss E. Cardale, who was so unsub- duable as a prophetess in Irving's chapel, with her wordy condemnations of her brother prophet, Mr. Taplin, that she distracted attention from Irving's eloquent discourse, and some- times reduced him to silence. My grandfather from the early 'thirties onward divided his interests very sharply. As regards "worldly" affairs there was the Royal Exchange and its insurance business, quite out of touch with the Second Coming of Christ, a theme scarcely even to be discussed in the City; but in regard to spiritual matters there was the implicit belief that at any moment the Redeemer might appear in the sky over England, or some other part of Northwest Europe, and the two hundred and forty-four thousand of the Elect would be caught up to meet Him in their earthly bodies (being absolved from death), and the Millennium would begin with Christ's reign on earth. It was assumed of course that the Catholic Apostolic Church by that time would have increased in number of adherents sufificiently (it never did so) to provide from its most perfected members the number of the Elect. All else of other Christian churches and sects must die and gain "Heaven" through some more or less painful trial — martyrdom under "the Beast," in most cases. The least unfortunate among them would form a body identified with the Two Witnesses of the Book of the Revelation. Gradually the Two Witnesses nar- rowed into identification with the Church of England; for as the Catholic Apostolic Church "grew up" and surveyed the religious thinkers of Europe it could only find affinity of thought and sentiment in the Established Church of England, Wales, and (in those days) of Ireland. Though its Liturgy, a very scholarly production, completed during the 'forties and 'fifties, had incorporated much of the Greek and Roman ritual and impressed the Low Church examiner as "papistical," the senti- ment of the Catholic Apostolic Church tended almost passion- ately towards the Anglican High Church and not to the Presby- terianism from which Irving had emerged. Soon after Irving's death the sporadic hysteriomaniacs of Southwest Scotland, utter- THE STORY OF MY LIFE 7 ers of unknown tongues, the miraculously-healed of mysterious diseases who had joined the new Church in London, quarreled with its ornate services and hierarchy of clergy and faded away. It was Henry Drummond, whatever might be asserted and inter- polated, who had brought this Church or sect into being. He had molded its Liturgy and ceremonial so as to include the most striking and effective prayers, anthems, songs, ceremonies, and services of the Churches of Rome and Greece, and tempered it with the sobriety and propriety of the Church of England. In April, 1855, my father's first wife, Annette, died of puer- peral fever a short time after giving birth to my brother George. In the summer of 1857, my father married Esther Laetitia Ham- ilton, and I was the first child of their marriage. My mother's mother was the only child of John Mainwaring and his wife, Mary Flower. My grandmother could never have been described as pretty, though she was in after life both witty and clever. She had too straight and thin-lipped a mouth, yet she attracted suitors and was, when quite young, married by a man reputed to be of considerable wealth who was some twenty years older than herself. Previous to her marriage, she had been noted for her skill in drawing and design and had been a student at the Royal Academy Schools. Her father was seemingly a jeweler who had a place of business in Fleet Street. He claimed to be descended from the only child born to the great actress, Nance Oldfield, by her union with Arthur Maynwaring, early in the eighteenth century. Arthur Maynwaring, a "Life" of whom I possess from the remains of my grandmother's library, was a member of the Mainwaring family of South Cheshire and North Shropshire. He was what would be called a "civil servant" of the Queen Anne period, with a quavering attachment to the Stuart dynasty. His son, Arthur, was apparently my great-great-great-grandfather; and consequently the mother of this Arthur — Nance or Anne Oldfield, the great actress of the Queen Anne period — was my ancestress in this direction. 8 THE STORY OF MY LIFE Robert Hamilton was the son of a Scottish artist, Alexander Hamilton of Edinburgh, who seems to have attained some fame as a portrait-painter in Scotland in the eighteenth century. His son, Robert, went out early in life as a cadet or clerk at Calcutta for the East India Company. Apparently he did not remain long in this service. Hazy reports accredited or discredited him with acquiring as his share of loot in warfare or by more prosaic means a supply of diamonds and rubies from the coffers of some Indian prince; and with this nucleus of valuable stones he founded the jewelers' firm of Hamilton at Calcutta. John Main- waring, the jeweler in Fleet Street, became their London agent, or at any rate transacted much business with them. In this way, when Robert Hamilton returned to England at about forty years of age and with a handsome fortune, he met Mary Mainwaring — a student then at the Royal Academy and a miniature painter — and married her. They lived at Brighton (where my mother was born) and at Norwood, where my grandfather purchased an estate known as "Bloomfield" which was still in existence, with about twelve acres of garden and woodland, twenty years ago. The marriage took place about 1826, and was followed by a family of at least eleven children who lived to maturity. My grandfather died in 1850 or 1851. Mrs. Hamilton was attracted by the tenets of the Catholic Apostolic Church, and thus came to know my father's family when she lived at or near Rochester in the early 'fifties. My father's younger brother married the eld- est of her daughters, and my father himself espoused the younger, Esther, my mother. From my earliest consciousness I delighted in my grandmother Hamilton. She was the sort of woman who entranced children with her fairy stories; and she was a remarkable artist in black and white, and famous for her "illustrated envelopes." These probably would be voted nuisances now ; but in the early days of frequent correspondence brought about by penny postage, they were thought very original ; and in the case of those designed by her were really charming pictures in penmanship. For the last fourteen years of her life she lived near Carisbrook in the Isle of Wight. .Iho-vt : Robert Hamilton, the au- thor's maternal grandfather. Bclo'iv: The author's paternal grandfather, John Johnston (1863). Above: Portrait of Arthur Mayn- waring, the author's great-great-great- great grandfather (about 1710). BfloTc: Portrait of the author's father (about 1890). THE STORY OF MY LIFE 9 The first thing I remember in life was at the time of my fourth birthday, the summer of 1862. I was walking complacently clown the tree-shaded garden of a house at the top of Camberwell Grove, and scratching legs and wrists which had raised flushed eruptions on them. . . . "Why, child!" exclaimed my nurse, Diana Barber, "you've got the measles again !" So I was borne off and put to bed in broad daylight. Then a short interval of time — for the measles to run their course — and I was staying on an opulent farmstead at Milton, near Lymington in Hampshire. The farmer apparently bred peafowl. There was a great straw rick yard, and a large but kind farmer's boy named Peckham. Peckham was apparently released from some of his farm work during my stay and allowed to carry me about and lure the pea- cocks up for my admiring examination. It was as though at this early age I had been inducted into a new worship. The next two years of my life were given up mainly to the drawing of peafowl in ink and pencil. I renewed acquaintance with these most intelligent and beautiful birds in Kent, a few years later, and again in Tunis in 1879-80, saw them wild and half-tamed in India in 1895, imported them myself into Central Africa, kept them in the Consulate grounds when I was transferred to Tunis in 1897; and ever since I made a permanent home in Sussex have had them there. In 1863 my parents moved to another house of my grand- father's— Sutton Lodge, Cowley Road, Brixton. Here there stood a white stucco house different in appearance to the others in the countrylike road. Sutton Lodge was supposed to have existed before there was any Cowley Road, to have been part of some estate "out in the country." Certainly in the 'sixties Brixton ended in that direction, and at the back of the long garden there was a row of tall trees, a ditch and an open space known as "the Field," which produced corn and potatoes and grazing ground, and stretched away without a building to Den- mark Hill, Heme Hill and Tulse Hill. In the next house to the right lived my grandparents ; in the house to the left my great- uncle Henry and his wife. 10 THE STORY OF MY LIFE I disliked my grandfather from my first realization of him when I was five or six. He by that time — poor soul — was suffer- ing from the effects of a paralytic stroke; and I dare say my vocal and bodily activities got on his nerves as he lay in the invalid chair in his garden. But he died somewhere about 1865. When I reached the age of six I was sent to a little school hard by, in the same Cowley Road, which was kept by a mother and three daughters of the name of Jones. And here I learned a great deal in a short space of time : to read and write and spell ; to add, subtract and divide. At the age of eight I went as their first scholar to a delightful group of ladies, the Misses Selby, who after their father's death had decided to turn a charming house they occupied at Surbiton into a school for little boys. I was their first pupil, and for about six months their only one. Then scholars came in numbers; and when in 1867 I was taken away to be placed much nearer home at a school kept by the Misses Pace in Camberwell Grove I was miserable. The two sisters Pace were thoroughly nice women, and their school had already attained a certain local celebrity: amongst other noteworthy pupils had been Joseph Chamberlain. But the Misses Selby were something quite out of the common as schoolmistresses. There were four of them, and they had traveled, had studied music and painting, had intelligent views on political questions, knew some- thing about botany, and even dared in the hearing at any rate of one pupil tremblingly to discuss the bearings of Darwin's Origin of Species. It is curious, looking on Surbiton as it is to-day, a smug and asphalted suburb, to reflect that in the 'sixties it was a country village. The Selbys' school was on its Norbiton side, and five minutes' walk from the house one was in unspoiled country with a profusion of wild flowers, reedy ponds, rushy commons, flocks of geese, farmsteads, watercress beds, and little hint of Town being within eight or nine miles. I certainly had my initiation into country life here; was taught as much botany as I could retain, much about wild birds, about the Thames, about land- scape painting and the French language. Having lived at one THE STORY OF MY LIFE 11 time abroad, the Selbys were competent to teach French and even Italian. By the time I was nine I could speak French passably, and was learning it from the French-written books. ^ Why I was not allowed to remain at this school, which grew into quite a large establishment before long, I do not know. It was not due to a desire for economy, because my father was now quite a well-to-do man. My grandfather was dead and my father had inherited half what he had to leave and was drawing between two and three thousand pounds a year from the Royal Insurance Company, whose London Secretary he had been since about 1850. He shared to the full my passionate love of the country, very slightly slaked by a view over unbuilt-on Brixton. It was "the Church" which held him to the outskirts of London: the Catholic Apostolic Church in Trinity Square in the Borough of South- wark. He believed unshakably that "the Lord" might come at any time ; that at His Second Coming those of the Elect who had held their faith would be caught up into the air to meet Him, would, without dying, be subtly changed into immortal beings, and — apparently — would return to earth with the Son of God, to assist Him in governing the planet for the Millennial Period ; after which this poor little world would be destroyed by fire, or at any rate cease to interest the Creator of all things. If any one not of the Catholic Apostolic Church survives, who knew my father in his later years at home or abroad, who worked with him in the City or came out to visit him at our home in the suburbs, and reads this passage, he may be surprised. He can remember an acute man of business who set right this and that tangle ; a fellow-traveler on the continent or in South Africa, Asia Minor, the United States; a member of the Royal Geo- graphical Society, following African exploration shrewdly and with some knowledge of African problems; but they will prob- ably be quite unaware of his having held these hopes of the Second Coming — hopes so inconsistent with the extension of railways, the enormous development of the United States, the 1 Helen Selby, the last surviving of the four sisters, did not die till the beginning of 1923, somewhere about ninety years of age. 12 THE STORY OF MY LIFE invention of air-distended tires on wheels, of the bicycle and motor, the aeroplane and airship, the giant steamer going at thirty knots an hour: in short the enormous development of Man's knowledge and his conquest of this planet which has taken place since Edward Iving, Henry Drummond, John Bate Cardale and John Tudor met to pray and commune at Albury House. Much seemed to happen to me between the autumn of the hottest summer on record — 1868 — and the autumn of 1869, when I w^as over eleven years old. I had had scarlet fever rather badly in the summer of 1868, and had nearly died afterwards from an internal complication. On return to London in Sep- tember, 1868, it was enjoined on my parents by the doctor that I should have a year's rest from schooling, a full twelve months to be spent in idleness. This was one of the happiest times I can remember. A younger sister of my mother had come to live with us, prior to her mar- riage in 1869 to my father's brother, a pioneer colonist in Vancouver Island. She was a good water-color painter and wanted to have further training as an artist. So she got into relations with the South Lambeth School of Art, and came to know a person remarkable in those days: John Sparkes. My constant plea to accompany her and to spend part of my leisure learning to draw resulted in my coming to know Mr. Sparkes before I was eleven, and retaining him as a friend almost to the end of his life in 1908. In 1869 he was a singularly hand- some man of what we liked then to consider the "Saxon" type. Those were very Anglo-Saxon days in London and perhaps elsewhere in the British Isles. Kingsley had just written Here- ward, the Last of the English; Freeman had become enthusiastic about the Saxons; and historians generally decried the Kelts. The South Lambeth students, till Mr. Sparkes left them for pro- motion to South Kensington, liked to think that in him they had a peculiarly Saxon leader. The only thing that perplexed me about him in those early days — and seemed so irreconcilable with my after-impressions — was the assertion of another aunt — a THE STORY OF MY LIFE 13 Cramsie, also an art student — that Sparkes was a Swedenborgian in religion. Another decisive landmark in the early summer of 1869 was my first visit to Rochester. My mother had received most of her education at Eastgate House in Rochester High Street, in those days and perhaps far back into the eighteenth century a famous girls' school. Some time in the early 'eighties its struc- ture and appearance as a town dwelling of Elizabethan times or the earlier Tudor period, together with Dickens's affection for it (as evidenced by his allusions to it in his early essays, and his idealization of it as "The Nuns' House" in Edwin Drood), caused it to be bought and turned to the more appropriate pur- pose of a Rochester Museum. But for a good many years it had been tenanted or owned by two or three ladies of the Dutch or Flemish name of "ten Broncken-Kaartje." This lengthy surname had long been turned locally into "the Miss Brunkers," and so persisted in that form that I am not quite certain of my transcription of their real name. But it was a justly celebrated school and very like Dickens's description, the resemblance even extending of Miss Twinkleton to the principal Miss "Brunker." At this school my mother had formed a friendship for Eliza- beth L., one of the dearest and most remarkable women I have ever met. She had been a bridesmaid at my mother's wedding in 1857, and when I was two years old I had been taken down on a visit to the L.'s country home at Nashenden, three miles out of Rochester : thereafter had been given a promise that as soon as I was old enough to go on a visit by myself, I should be asked to stay. Accordingly, in July, 1869, came the invitation, and my first train journey all by myself (though "under the care of the guard") to Rochester. She met me at the old station by the bridge, and opposite her and her mother I was driven out in an open carriage to Nashenden, I remember the punctiliousness with which I put on a pair of dark green kid gloves which had been taken off in the train, and much of our conversation as we drove out the three miles along St. Margaret's and the Borstal Road. All was country, unadulterated country then, directly you had passed St. Margaret's Church. . ,., . 14 THE STORY OF MY LIFE A pony to ride, a mazy flower-garden to thread, with such an abundance and variety of flowering plants as seem to my memory to have forestalled the floral developments of the 'eighties and 'nineties; arbors to take tea in — tea accompanied by bread and honey from the hives hard by; cows to be milked and new milk to be drunk — almost intoxicating and sweet, like new wine ; hills to climb, woods to penetrate, straw stacks to ascend and slide down. We had breakfasts of amplitude; dinners in the middle of the day; and tea-suppers at seven. There were wonderful provision cupboards in the farmhouse dining-room, cupboards with which I was reported to have fallen in love at the age of two, cupboards so large that even at eleven I could walk about in them, cupboards holding only slightly in reserve incredible stores of crystallized fruits, rich biscuits, currant cakes, nuts, damson cheeses, and brandied cherries. Once I fell over the pony's head trying to do something unusual in the stack yard, the pony snapped his rein and ran away to the front door, so that Miss L.'s father for three minutes thought I must be lying somewhere killed or unconscious; three times in six weeks I had brief bilious attacks from over-eating; and once, on the road returning to Rochester, near St. Margaret's Church — when I had somehow become isolated from my dear Miss L. — I was attacked and rather cruelly handled by a troop of country girls returning from school. Those were the only disagreeable incidents I can recall out of rapturous six weeks in which town and country life were intermingled. Sometimes we stayed — mostly from Monday to Friday — at the farm; the rest of the week at the town house in Rochester, a house on the New Road at the top of Star Hill, with a convenient steep side lane that took you down to the stables first and next to the High Street running on toward Chatham. From my bedroom window I had intriguingly interesting views in one direction down the Medway — shipping, war-works, forts, Admiralty buildings — in another across a high garden wall into the intimacies of a family of large ladies, whose names but not whose personalities I have forgotten. In proximity to their somewhat cloistered dwelling THE STORY OF MY LIFE 15 was a large flour-grinding mill, belonging to a Mr. Belsey who afterwards played a noteworthy part in local and Liberal politics. What I chiefly remember of him in those early days is that he was a Nonconformist (though respected as such), had a cheery appearance, but was much given to prayer and praise, interwoven with large teas and breakfasts, and had an immeasurable respect for Mr. Gladstone. This household in Rochester in 1869 and the following years seemed to me in advance of its age and average. Here, at least, were middle-class people living in the greatest comfort, with an eye to furniture that discriminated between good and bad, an eye to sanitation, a splendidly endowed bathroom, or even, I fancy, two bathrooms, one for males and the other for females; and a library with a range of volumes that stretched from the middle of the eighteenth to the middle of the nineteenth cen- turies. There were little pairs of steps which could be moved by a child, and up which you climbed to reach the books from the tiers near the ceiling. There were old French books with the quaintest improprieties little understood by a boy of eleven; there were learned tomes of the eighteen-thirties, at the awaken- ing of Science and modern learning; Latin and Greek classics, and translations of the same; novels from 1840 to 1869; some of Darwin's works, Sir Charles Lyell's, and the first strivings after evolution problems ; everything that Dickens had published short of Edwin Drood, the entirety of Scott, the eight volumes of Buffon on Natural History, nearly all Bohn's series of "clas- sics," even to the Golden Ass of Apuleius; and Gibbon's Decline and Fall. Some one must have once loved this library, but who it was I never heard. The father of the L.'s, though a remark- able man who left his mark on ungrateful Rochester, gave them their Castle Gardens and freed Castle, was several times Mayor, improved their gas, their roadways, their breweries, their mu- nicipal buildings, hospitals and water supply, did not seem much of a reader, a library man. Perhaps he had been so when younger, or he may have inherited the earlier books from his father. 16 THE STORY OF MY LIFE The L.'s were derived from two sources: Jews who settled at Chatham in the late eighteenth century and became connected with shipping and dealing with the War Office and Admiralty in provisions; and several Rochester and East Kent families, old- fashioned Anglicans with a contempt for Nonconformity — solici- tors, farmers, and town officials. The family as I knew it was Church of England, only differing as to whether they preferred the Cathedral (this suited the males) or the Evangelical tendency of St. Nicholas (this was preferred by the females). Mr. L., the father, only went to church on great occasions — as mayor or alderman ; Mrs. L., the mother, never went, on the excuse of health delicacy; the two sons attended the Cathedral morning service, usually for municipal reasons ; and the daughters devoted themselves to St. Nicholas, an ancient church placed with Me- dieval nonchalance just outside the Cathedral precincts. The family as I first knew it consisted of four daughters and two sons. One daughter — Annie — extraordinarily pretty as I deemed her to be — was already married and producing children; she came, in fact, to stay with her parents that summer, bringing two nurses and two small children and the constitution of an incipient invalid. Not only were her good looks patent to all men, but she had a charming manner, which I gathered from overheard female conversations indicated a certain degree of "falseness." . . . "One thing to your face, another behind your back." That may have been so. But it was at any rate alluring to have so much sweetness and discriminating confidence shown in your presence, even though you were only a little boy in knickerbockers. She differed from her other sisters in exhibiting a flippancy toward religion which at once attracted me; for already at that age I was beginning to dislike all this running-down of our earthly existence, this pretense that we were saving up for something far better in the world beyond the grave. Then — for 1869 — I sup- pose she was witty, as well as being angelically pretty. I thought the little shafts she aimed deliciously funny, the more so as the person aimed at was sometimes dense enough to concur. Her husband we should have described in these days as "over- THE STORY OF MY LIFE 17 sexed." He was a great big, blond man with a terribly hearty laugh and twinkling blue eyes, a prosperous stock broker, or something of that kind : one of four or five brothers, very Saxon, mostly large and good-looking, in or about the Army, utterly immoral — as I came to know them to be — who all of them made unhappy marriages through their own infidelities. I believe the only one of them who attained anything like old age was the husband of Annie N., but he wasted his substance over a number of other women, and his once lovely wife died separated from him and embittered. But we were not to foresee that, thirty years before it hap- pened; and in 1869 no one seemed happier or more likely to remain happy than this charmingly pretty young woman. . . . Amongst other characters in this little comedy was an uncle of the L.'s on their mother's side: Edward Coles, who lived in a big stern-looking house on Star Hill, Coles was a solicitor with an immense local practise. He was a fine-looking man of about sixty, said to have married young, to have lost his wife early, and to have quarreled with his only son on account of an unapproved marriage. The son was banished to the Isle of Wight; and his father — a Dickens character if ever there were one in actual life — lived on in cold seclusion, a widower, but provided with a comely looking housekeeper, a large house very difficult to enter and explore, even to his rather daunted nephews and nieces, a garden enclosed by high brick walls, where there were gooseberry- bushes, the fruit of which was the only hospitality I received. He was a tall, handsome, well-preserved elderly man in 1869, enthu- siastic on one subject only : shooting with rifle and shotgun. Next or near to the portal of his grim-looking, much closed dwelling was a door with one name on it in a large metal plate : "Wingent" : which for years I assumed to be a coarsened Kentish form of Vincent. And next door to "Wingent" was 'Trail." Mr. Prall was a solicitor, the brother of the Town Clerk, and parent of a large family of black-eyed, rosy-cheeked boys and girls. But the outstanding fact for me in 1869 was that Charles 18 THE STORY OF MY LIFE Dickens lived — when at home — within a drive of Rochester, at Gad's Hill. His house, I confess, seemed to me, even in those days of worship, too "early nineteenth century" ; and it was placed too near the main road for dignity. Visitors from America and elsewhere were wont to have their vehicles drawn up just outside the raised front garden, and there sit and gloat and nudge one another if a daughter or a maid servant came out of the dwelling and picked a flower. At one end of this front garden was a wooden chalet raised up among the trees, where Dickens was reported to be writing a new novel at that moment. Great, indeed, therefore was the thrill when one day, toward the close of my long visit, strolling past the Cathedral with Miss L., she pressed my arm, bent and said in a low voice, "That is Mr. Dickens, taking notes in the Cathedral porch." I turned my eyes discreetly and saw a not very tall man in a double-breasted cutaway coat and a tall chimney pot hat, with a grizzled beard look up at us from writing in a note book. I am bound to say the look did not strike me as friendly: he seemed annoyed at being recognized and interrupted in what no doubt were the first notes taken for Edwin Drood. We passed on hur- riedly; but I burst out excitedly to an assembled luncheon party on my return : "We've seen Charles Dickens, and he was making notes about Rochester Cathedral !" "Quite likely, my dear," said the impassive Mrs. L. "But go and smooth your hair and wash your hands before you come in to lunch." Mrs. L.'s only interests in middle age seemed to me to lie in such things as "Lily leaves steeped in brandy." This confection and numberless others — remedies, salves, stimulants, purges, car- minatives— filled countless jars, gallipots, and glass vessels on the shelves of the two bathrooms and of her own ample bedroom. I never heard of their being administered to any one, and they were placed too high up for easy access and experimental trial on my part. She was a kindly, taciturn, generous old lady, who after her husband's death in 1871 seemed to me to live on for many more years at Buxton and Bath. Her youngest daughter, Sophie, who some years afterwards married my eldest brother. THE STORY OF MY LIFE 19 was still at a "finishing school" in 1869. She had at the age of eighteen got so near the end of educability that she had reached the height "of painting flowers" on white velvet . . . chair- backs, or the opulent covering of elegant sofas. This information humbled one who could only aspire at best to Double Elephant drawing paper. My first Rochester visit in 1869 may have lasted from July to September only, but it bulks very large in my life's remem- brances. It was followed by many others, often twice in the year, till I became knit up with Africa; and the L.'s married, lived elsewhere, grew to be invalids, or died : or surviving in the next generation through marriage alliances with my own and other families, settled in other parts of Kent. But not only in East Kent did my intense love of country life and scenery find satisfaction. One of my father's sisters had married a Dr. Purcell from Cork, who had become head-master of a government school at Greenwich. They were allotted a gov- ernment house, rent free, on Maze Hill; but in this same mem- orable year (1869) Mr. Gladstone had decided that the school had become unnecessary. My uncle was retired on a pension equivalent to full pay, and selected as a place to live at the village of Whitchurch, four miles from Monmouth, and near the Here- fordshire Wye. (It has since been much built over and uglified; but in those days, the 'seventies and early 'eighties, it represented the perfection of English country scenery.) The hills near at hand were nine hundred, a thousand, twelve hundred feet high ; and the Black Mountains of Brecknock — gloomy with forest and rain clouds — were within sight and had an altitude of some two thousand five hundred feet. The towns within range — Ross, Monmouth, Hereford, Coleford, were full of quaint and lovely bits of architecture; there were ruined abbeys and castles all along the Wye Valley ; Chepstow, at the end of a drive of faultless beauty, with Tintern Abbey on the way, was rich in picturesque- ness, with its uplifted castle and wide-stretching views toward the sea-like Severn. Until 1881 most of my holidays from school 20 THE STORY OF MY LIFE or college were spent either in East Kent or in Hereford- Gloucester-Monmouthshire. The dictum of the family doctor in 1868 that I was to be kept from school for twelve months exercised a marked effect on my liberty of action in regard to education. Before this decision was accepted by indulgent parents, I had gone far toward acquiring the French language, so that in the Year of Indulgence — as it seemed to me — I could read with comprehension simple books in French, and in fact passed much of that twelve months reading in libraries and studying painting at the South Lambeth School of Art, or drawing animals at the Zoological Gardens. In the winter of 1869-70 we moved to a large and pleasant house in the South Lambeth Road, close to the Clapham Road, and here the disused rooms for a theoretical coachman were transformed for me into a bedroom adjoining a studio with top lights. Here I had accommodation for home studies in drawing. Somewhere about this year — 1870 — I began to make the acquaintance of the British Museum and to do so — incongruously enough — through a daughter of Edward Irving. Edward Irving, whether or not he was love-lorn through fail- ing to marry Mrs. Carlyle, must have had two or more children by the wife he did marry. He left a daughter and at least one son, who became an "angel" of a Catholic Apostolic Church. The daughter married Mr. Samuel Rawson Gardiner, the great historian. They lived in London in some square of the W. C. district at no great distance from the British Museum. They had a family of nice, hearty, friendly boys and girls, and I liked Mrs. Gardiner very much, though she always reminded me on superior lines of Mrs. Jellyby. Her husband I was early led to revere as a great historian, but he seemed to me when I was young, rather like a new type of ogre, a spectacled ogre, with fierce nose, large teeth, and a red beard. He came to the table at lunch time, but retreated soon afterwards to his impregnable study from which issued historical works of such real importance and interest, that even as a schoolboy one could appreciate them. THE STORY OF MY LIFE 21 I never remember Mrs. Gardiner, despite her ancestry, worry- ing me very much over religion, and her husband was apparently what we should now call an agnostic. Mrs. Gardiner's chief interest seemed to lie in the British Museum, and it was she who first inducted me into its collections, taking mc there again and again to visit antiquities and the old Natural History galleries, after an ample though untidy lunch, and back again to an excel- lent tea of a similarly diffuse nature. In this same year, I went when I was twelve to the not far distant Stockwell Grammar School to submit to a more stereo- typed form of education (as I thought), but in reality to be inducted very thoroughly into such things as really mattered. Looking back on this four and a half years — 1870-1875 — I esteem myself fortunate in having followed my two elder brothers at this school. It was situated in the Stockwell Park Road on the east side of the Clapham Road, and had been founded, somewhere about 1850, as a preparatory school to King's College in the Strand. Just prior to my going there a new head-master, a new staff of masters had been appointed, and they were certainly to be distinguished by modernity of views and comparative youth. The head-master was the Rev. Edgar San- derson who was later on selected to preside over a large Public School in Yorkshire, and whose books on education and geog- raphy attained some fame. The master dealing with the classics, the French master, and the artist who taught drawing I particu- larly remember, because their teaching seemed so unlike the style generally then in vogue. Sanderson, who directed the trend of the school, was particularly eager that we should study Latin, not only or merely as the medium of an excessively boring litera- ture of the Golden Age, but as the eventual parent of Italian, Spanish, French and Portuguese. Viewed in that aspect it be- came— to me, at any rate — a subject of inexhaustible interest. He inducted us into Gaston Paris's French translation of Diez's Grammar of the Latin Tongues, this French version being a little fuller and clearer than the German original of the early 'sixties. 22 THE STORY OF MY LIFE He taught geography and geology from the standpoint of Lyell and Geikie, and British history as J. R. Green was about to reveal it. The master dealing with the classics directed our atten- tion to late Latin writers of the early Christian centuries (Boethius), as well as to Vergil and Plautus. The French mas- ter, whom we suspected of being a Communard that had left France for his political opinions in 1871, was at any rate an orig- inal and entertaining teacher of French, and like the head-master wished us to understand how it came to be derived from Latin and Frankish German. The teacher of drawing (a noteworthy aquarellist) viewed art from a new standpoint, Realism — though he would be considered old-fashioned now. He insisted on our drawing direct from actuality, painting only what we saw, and inventing nothing. He was a friend of Mr. Sparkes of Lambeth, so that while at Stockwell I continued to be in touch with the trend of teaching at that art school. What particularly made me happy at this Grammar School was the open-mindedness of most of its masters, of the head- master especially. For instance, he realized fully how much there was to be learned in the way of anatomy at the museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, in biology at the Zoological Gardens, and made such arrangements of attendance at classes and occa- sional extra half-holidays as enabled me to work at those places. He sometimes hired a brake, two brakes, filled them with a class, and drove us out into Surrey on geological picnics. He did not punish me because I loathed the study of Euclid and deemed that for me, with my particular outlook, brain-racking algebra was little likely to be of use, while geometry on the other hand was decidedly worth attention. One way and another, my four and a half years at this school constituted a time of unbroken interest and happiness. I liked the masters and the boys. I can not remember a quarrel or difference of opinion with either. But apparently this modernity of education was not — in the suburbs • — a paying proposition. Sanderson and the other masters in due time passed on to greater establishments of a modernist trend; a different class of boys — or the parents thereof — required a \ Sketch of the author's mother as a girl of nineteen. THE STORY OF MY LIFE 23 type of education which left modern languages in the lurch, the ample site of the school just off the Clapham Road, with its warder's lodge and tall trees, became valuable and the trustees sold it. The school was swept away, I think, before this century began. I left the Grammar School at the beginning of 1875 when I was over sixteen, and became an evening student at King's College, where I devoted myself more especially to the classes in French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese. Much of the day- light was taken up with work at the South Lambeth Art School, where I was hoping to qualify for admission to the Royal Acad- emy Schools as a student in painting. In 1872 I had applied for a student's ticket to work as an artist in the Zoological Gardens. I do not know whether such facilities are given nowadays, but from the early 'sixties onward till the end of the last century students' tickets were very gener- ously granted by the Society through the Secretary, Dr. Sclater. They admitted the holder every day except Saturday and Sunday. (You could always get in — somehow — on these other days, but were rightly prohibited from erecting easels and obstructing visitors.) My ticket when it was issued came to me just after my fourteenth birthday. I made use of it on Wednesday after- noons, and if some especially interesting or important occasion arose, not in the holiday season, generally obtained permission to absent myself from school. Soon after I began to frequent the Gardens I attracted the attention of Professor Alfred Garrod, the young prosector of the Zoological Society. He came and spoke to me one afternoon when I was drawing a lion's head, and invited me into his pro- sectorium. Having made me free of this — wonderland, as it seemed, withdrawn from the accession of the ordinary sight- seers— he encouraged me and numerous other youths and young men to come and study there, to dissect, to learn the structure of birds, beasts and reptiles. In my case I made some small return by drawing illustrations for his books or papers, though I was often paid for these by his 24 THE STORY OF MY LIFE publishers. He introduced me to Professor (Sir William) Flower, then Curator of the Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons, who turned out to be a very distant connection of my own. (I recognized him by his pronunciation of the vowel "o." My Flamilton aunts and uncles all had a peculiar, pursed-lip pronunciation of this vowel. In my mother it was barely notice- able. Professor Flower, in fact, spoke and laughed exactly like these relations. I knew that my great-grandmother on my mother's side — Mrs. John Mainwaring — had been a Miss Flower, and I ascertained that she had been sister or cousin to Professor Flower's grandfather.) However that might be, the Flowers were exceedingly kind, and my studies at the College of Surgeons' Museum (of which I became in 1902 one of the Trustees) were facilitated. This Museum, founded by the great John Hunter, is one of the won- ders of London, and is generously open to the public six days of the week. In the time of my youth, it was not thought quite — er — proper or delicate that men and women students should face the mysteries of our anatomy and that of the higher mammals together; so on Fridays the Museum was more or less reserved for women, who only had one day instead of six in the week to study its contents. Males were not forbidden to enter on the Friday, since I remember coming in one Friday morning and witnessing a curious accident. A large, buxom, pleasant- featured young woman wished to study some point in an exceptionally large and swinish-looking, bottled infant. I did not see — from an upper gallery where I was drawing a chimpanzee's brain — exactly what happened, but somehow in pushing her examina- tion of the enormous bottle too near or too far it overbalanced, the immense stopper came out, the infant after it, and the hys- terical, screaming girl was seated on the floor holding the hundred-years-old genie thus released from its confinement, deluged by its preserving spirit, and surrounded by the fragments of the smashed vessel. I was engaged on this occupation of drawing chimpanzees' brains for some purpose of Professor Garrod's, I think for a THE STORY OF MY LIFE 25 series of articles on biology he was doing for Cassell's Natural History. I may have been between seventeen and eighteen at the time. A short, stoutish, pleasant-faced elderly man, with the usual side-whiskers of those days, came once or twice and looked at me. Then he cleared his throat, and introduced himself as "Sir Erasmus Wilson." "I have heard about you from Professor Flower," he said, "and understand you are an art student. I wonder if I may make a proposal to you? I am giving three or four lectures on the growth of hair on the human skin. You may or may not know that there occur cases — very painful cases, sometimes — of young women . . . more frequently of young men ... in which the hair-growth of the body is abnormally developed. It is not too much to say that with their clothes off they look, all but the face and the front side of the neck, like the apes. I have at pres- ent consulting me a young woman — perhaps she's thirty — a per- fectly healthy and normal person otherwise, who is completely covered with hair, save on the throat and chest. I wanted some one like yourself to attend at my consulting room. Her face of course will be concealed from observation. , . . But — I thought — if you made the necessary notes — this is very important — as to the direction of the hair-growth. . . . It is almost exactly that of the anthropoid apes. — Then you might draw a figure from some bust or statue and insert the hair from the notes you have taken of our observations?" I attended, made the notes, drew the greater part of the figure from some statue of Venus — or a reputed Venus — and inserted the hair-growth under Sir Erasmus's supervision, with particular attention to its direction. It was a glossy brown, I remember. At the lecture or lectures there were further exhibited drawings of chimpanzees, and lantern-slides from photographs of the set and direction of their hair-growth; and the similarity between anthropoid ape and human was certainly remarkable. In the case of Sir Erasmus's patient the hair grew thickly on the neck, below the head-hair, and on the back, and on the upper and outer arms was profuse. It continued down the body almost to the ankles. 26 THE STORY OF MY LIFE but was altogether more abundant on the back. In front it did not seem to begin till the lower part of the bust, and was thinner on the inner side of the arms, but luxuriant on the belly and the thighs, absent from the hands and feet. The surgeon and skin doctor at this period was preparing to write a treatise on the growth of hair on the human body. I do not remember whether he lived to publish his work. But he left me with the impression that cases of body-hairiness (to a remark- able extent, but of course concealed by clothing) occurred fre- quently among the northern, long-headed Europeans, the long- headed Mediterranean people of North Africa, and here and there in Portugal, southwestern France, amongst the Russian peasantry, and some of the Balkan peoples. A little later in time the "Hairy Ainu" of northern Japan were made known to us; and although there is a good deal of variation amongst them I have seen examples visiting an exhibition in London which cer- tainly showed (though more on the underside or front of the body) a remarkable development of hair growth. This again occurs, sporadically, in West Burma, in southern India and Ceylon, in African Pygmies, and even among certain West African tribes like the Krumen of Liberia. In the later years of my life, especially in the Great War, I have occasionally assisted with the wounded or killed in hospitals, and have come to realize that hairy men of our own race exist far more abundantly than the general public imagines. In the early days of my drawing at the Zoo, when I was fifteen or sixteen, I used to notice another draughtsman with a face and manner of distinction, usually working without a cap or hat, yet with a bald occiput and a fringe of curly, dark hair round it. There were numerous drawers of animals at that time, some of a humble class and rather rough manners, unexpected geniuses of the "pub" or the National School. With these I worked on my half -holidays on terms that were at any rate polite. They were inclined to be aggressive and noisy, only out of uncertainty as to their position. Most of them proved to be really decent fellows as they grew older, and one or two developed into THE STORY OF MY LIFE 27 geniuses in animal portraiture — it was before the days of per- fected and instantaneous photography. But the man who wore no hat, had dreamy eyes, indefinably well-cut clothes, who looked at us as though he did not see us, took my breath away with the boldness of his drawing. His lions and tigers, jaguars and leopards were superb, more, I should think, like what earlier variants of these creatures were in Man's primitive days, when the lions of South Germany, the tigers of North Asia, the leopards of North Africa were a third again as large as they are now. Garrod efifected an introduction, and Mr. J. T. Nettleship (as he turned out to be) made friends with me and used to invite me occasionally to see him at his studio on the verge of Camden Town. On these walls were studies and pictures more wonderful than any he ever exhibited. The reason was that the more fin- ished among them had either been rejected or were manifestly rejectable by the Royal Academy of those days, still entirely orthodox in regard to religion, and not seeing anything lawful or proper in attempts to depict Early Man (a strong predilection of Nettleship's) a hundred thousand years before Bishop Ussher's date for the opening of the Garden of Eden. But to me these bold paintings of a band of Neanderthal Men meeting a troop of faintly-spotted lions, of a struggle between the men of Neolithic civilization and the Cave-dwellers of Paleolithic culture, an attack on the magnificent Irish deer by low-browed P^leolithics with their primitive weapons of the earliest ages of chipped flints, were highly stimulating, if a little alarming. There were also "Scriptural" subjects of a preceding stage in Nettle- ship's mental development, when the Bible still interested him. There was a wonderful study of a wrestling match between Jacob and the Angel, Jacob being a naked ungainly man, and the Angel an Arabian genie of hideous and solemn aspect. Or a Hebrew prophet, drawn from some lean, coffee-colored Arab picked up at the docks; or an apostle painted from a Levantine Greek of Alexandria more truthfully represented (I thought) the beings of the eastern Mediterranean world two and three 28 THE STORY OF MY LIFE thousand years ago than the European types — Italian, French, Flemish, Rhinelander, from which Scriptural personages were drawn from the Dark Ages down to about 1870. Another personality who impressed me in my 'teens was Ernest Griset, though I doubt whether I ever spoke to him. But he used to come to the Zoological Gardens to draw, and some keeper told me who he was. His work, though it tended towards the weird, seemed to me strikingly original and in some senses artistic ; and though the beast, bird, or reptile he portrayed might have a narquois aspect, it was never without some odd fidelity to the original. He did in the 'sixties and 'seventies, for some mean, poorly-paying publisher (no doubt) some very striking "restorations" of extinct animals. I suspect he is long since dead, and he was far too original and unconventional to have any record in the Encyclop