the bat.

The sitting for that picture is the only thing I clearly remember
during those earlier days. I have no recollection of the disaster,
which, at four years old, altered my life. The catastrophe, as
others have described it, was that we three boys were riding cock-
horse on the balusters of the second floor of our house in Montagu
Place, Russell Square, when we indulged in a general melee, which
resulted in all tumbling over into the vestibule below. The others,
to whom I served as cushion, were not damaged beyond the power of
yelling, and were quite restored in half-an-hour, but I was
undermost, and the consequence has been a curved spine, dwarfed
stature, an elevated shoulder, and a shortened, nearly useless leg.

What I do remember, is my mother reading to me Miss Edgeworth's
Frank and the little do Trusty, as I lay in my crib in her bedroom.
I made one of my nieces hunt up the book for me the other day, and
the story brought back at once the little crib, or the watered blue
moreen canopy of the big four-poster to which I was sometimes lifted
for a change; even the scrawly pattern of the paper, which my weary
eyes made into purple elves perpetually pursuing crimson ones, the
foremost of whom always turned upside down; and the knobs in the
Marseilles counterpane with which my fingers used to toy. I have
heard my mother tell that whenever I was most languid and suffering
I used to whine out, 'O do read Frank and the little dog Trusty,'
and never permitted a single word to be varied, in the curious
childish love of reiteration with its soothing power.

I am afraid that any true picture of our parents, especially of my
mother, will not do them justice in the eyes of the young people of