time, the proofs of his translation of Victor Hugo's "Toilers of the
Sea." Such was my title to consideration, I believe, and also my first
introduction to the sea in literature. If I do not remember where, how
and when I learned to read, I am not likely to forget the process of
being trained in the art of reading aloud. My poor father, an admirable
reader himself, was the most exacting of masters. I reflect proudly that
I must have read that page of "Two Gentlemen of Verona" tolerably well
at the age of eight. The next time I met them was in a 5s. one-volume
edition of the dramatic works of William Shakespeare, read in Falmouth,
at odd moments of the day, to the noisy accompaniment of caulkers'
mallets driving oakum into the deck-seams of a ship in dry dock. We had
run in, in a sinking condition and with the crew refusing duty after a
month of weary battling with the gales of the North Atlantic. Books are
an integral part of one's life and my Shakespearean associations are
with that first year of our bereavement, the last I spent with my father
in exile (he sent me away to Poland to my mother's brother directly he
could brace himself up for the separation), and with the year of hard
gales, the year in which I came nearest to death at sea, first by water
and then by fire.

Those things I remember, but what I was reading the day before my
writing life began I have forgotten. I have only a vague notion that it
might have been one of Trollope's political novels. And I remember,
too, the character of the day. It was an autumn day with an opaline
atmosphere, a veiled, semi-opaque, lustrous day, with fiery points and
flashes of red sunlight on the roofs and windows opposite, while the
trees of the square with all their leaves gone were like tracings of
indian ink on a sheet of tissue paper. It was one of those London days
that have the charm of mysterious amenity, of fascinating softness.
The effect of opaline mist was often repeated at Bessborough Gardens on