o'clock in the morning." (So in the Autobiography, but 9.30 according to
the Family Bible.) "I am not aware," he tells us playfully in his
Autobiography, "that any portents preceded my arrival in this world,
but, in my childhood, I remember hearing a traditional account of the
manner in which I lost the chance of an endowment of great practical
value. The windows of my mother's room were open, in consequence of the
unusual warmth of the weather. For the same reason, probably, a
neighbouring beehive had swarmed, and the new colony, pitching on the
window-sill, was making its way into the room when the horrified nurse
shut down the sash. If that well-meaning woman had only abstained from
her ill-timed interference, the swarm might have settled on my lips, and
I should have been endowed with that mellifluous eloquence which, in
this country, leads far more surely than worth, capacity, or honest
work, to the highest places in Church and State. But the opportunity was
lost, and I have been obliged to content myself through life with saying
what I mean in the plainest of plain language, than which, I suppose,
there is no habit more ruinous to a man's prospects of advancement."

As to his debt, physical and mental, to either parent, he writes as
follows:--]

Physically I am the son of my mother so completely--even down to
peculiar movements of the hands, which made their appearance in me as I
reached the age she had when I noticed them--that I can hardly find any
trace of my father in myself, except an inborn faculty for drawing,
which, unfortunately, in my case, has never been cultivated, a hot
temper, and that amount of tenacity of purpose which unfriendly
observers sometimes call obstinacy.

My mother was a slender brunette, of an emotional and energetic