The room to the left of the porch is the study. In the room above it
Hugh was born.]

Then I vividly recall how in 1875, when we were all returning _en
famille_ from a long summer holiday spent at Torquay in a pleasant house
lent us in Meadfoot Bay, we all travelled together in a third-class
carriage; how it fell to my lot to have the amusing of Hugh, and how
difficult he was to amuse, because he wished to look out of the window
the whole time, and to make remarks on everything. But at Lincoln I
hardly remember anything of him at all, because I was at school with my
elder brother, and only came back for the holidays; and we two had
moreover a little sanctum of our own, a small sitting-room named Bec by
my father, who had a taste for pleasant traditions, after Anthony Bec,
the warlike Bishop of Durham, who had once been Chancellor of Lincoln.
Here we arranged our collections and attended to our own concerns,
hardly having anything to do with the nursery life, except to go to tea
there and to play games in the evening. The one thing I do remember is
that Hugh would under no circumstances and for no considerations ever
consent to go into a room in the dark by himself, being extremely
imaginative and nervous; and that on one occasion when he was asked what
he expected to befall him, he said with a shudder and a stammer: "To
fall over a mangled corpse, squish! into a pool of gore!"

When he was between four and five years old, at Lincoln, one of his
godfathers, Mr. Penny, an old friend and colleague of my father's at
Wellington College, came to stay at the Chancery, and brought Hugh a
Bible. My mother was sitting with Mr. Penny in the drawing-room after
luncheon, when Hugh, in a little black velvet suit, his flaxen hair
brushed till it gleamed with radiance, his face the picture of