"poets," though I read them conscientiously through. Southey fascinated
me with his wealth of Oriental fancies, while Spencer was a favorite
book, put beside Milton and Dante. My novel reading was extremely
limited; indeed the "three volume novel" was a forbidden fruit. My mother
regarded these ordinary love-stories as unhealthy reading for a young
girl, and gave me Scott and Kingsley, but not Miss Braddon or Mrs. Henry
Wood. Nor would she take me to the theatre, though we went to really good
concerts. She had a horror of sentimentality in girls, and loved to see
them bright and gay, and above all things absolutely ignorant of all evil
things and of premature love-dreams. Happy, healthy and workful were
those too brief years.



IV.


My grandfather's house, No. 8, Albert Square, Clapham Road, was a second
home from my earliest childhood.

That house, with its little strip of garden at the back, will always
remain dear and sacred to me. I can see now the two almond trees, so rich
in blossom every spring, so barren in fruit every autumn; the large
spreading tufts of true Irish shamrock, brought from Ireland, and
lovingly planted in the new grey London house, amid the smoke; the little
nooks at the far end, wherein I would sit cosily out of sight reading a
favorite book. Inside it was but a commonplace London house, only one
room, perhaps, differing from any one that might have been found in any
other house in the square. That was my grandfather's "work-room", where
he had a lathe fitted up, for he had a passion and a genius for inventive