registers very ancient and complete, and by the aid of them, together
with the printed register of Fountains Abbey, we traced a family tree
back as far as to the fourteenth century, with ever-increasing evidence
of the poverty and mean condition of our ancestral stock. We visited the
houses and cradles of the race, and from comfortable granges and
farmsteads we declined, as the record conducted us back, to hovels and
huts of quite conspicuous humility and squalor. The thermometer fell
lower and lower every day, in sympathy with our researches. I remember a
night when we slept in a neglected assembly-room tacked on to a country
inn, on hastily improvised and scantily covered beds, when the water
froze in the ewers; and an attempt to walk over the moors one afternoon
from Masham into Nidderdale, when the springs by the roadside froze into
lumpy congealments, like guttering candles, and we were obliged to turn
back; and how we beguiled a ten-mile walk to Ripon, the last train
having gone, by telling an enormous improvised story, each taking an
alternate chapter, and each leaving the knots to be untied by the next
narrator. Hugh was very lively and ingenious in this, and proved the
most delightful of companions, though we had to admit as we returned
together that we had ruined the romance of our family history beyond
repair.

[Illustration: _Photo by Elliott & Fry_

ROBERT HUGH BENSON

IN 1893. AGED 21

As an Undergraduate at Cambridge.]

Hugh did very little work at Cambridge; he had given up classics, and