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a strain of deep melancholy and self-distrust which in some of the family was almost a disease. Uncle Phil must have suffered under this all his life and could not control it enough to keep himself from making others suffer with him. He was quick to suspect an imagined slight or insult and would say or write something which would bring the unsuspecting offender to bewildered tears. Then he would fall into depths of repentance and self-accusation that shattered every one concerned. With it all his kindness was infinite and his generosity without stint. His was one of those unhappy dispositions that can rarely be at their best with their own family, and maddening self-consciousness made him say an unkind thingthrough sheer nervousness, or hold back, through a misplaced pride, from saying the kind word that would have made all the difference.
    When the gloomy mood was not upon him he was the most witty and amusing companion possible and reduced one to the unquenchable and painful laughter that makes the whole body ache so that one longs for death to relieve one’s agony. He was a creature of impulse and if he wanted to be kind it had to be at his own time and in his own way and sometimes it was difficult to express an adequate gratitude for something one hadn’t really wanted. Then his sensitive nature would feel slighted and out would come some cruel stinging word that annihilated one. But his friends – and they were very many and of all classes – cared very deeply for him and their affection outlasted all the trials that his unhappy disposition put upon it. That is why, over his ashes, the words are written Quoniam dilexit multum.
    It may be imagined after this description that to the nursery, as to his friends, Uncle Phil was an incalculable quantity. His coming was always afearful joy as it might mean a jaunt to Brighton with pennies to put into every machine on the pier and lunch at the Metropole, or we might find ourselves for some unknown reason in dire disgrace and be quickly shepherded from the room by a parent or grandparent anxious to avoid a scene. Not the least offence was to use Uncle Phil’s bedroom as a short cut from one house to the other. Not that he minded being discovered in bed or shaving, for these were treats to which we might be invited when our luck was in, but the mere fact of our dashing through his bedroom was an implicit slight on him, showing that his existence had for the moment been forgotten by the nursery contingent.
    So leaving Uncle Phil’s room undisturbed we will go down the last flight of the brown staircase, the flight over which my brother once leant too far and fell over on to his head with no evil results. At the bottom of the stairs was a choice of interests. We could stop and bang the barometer which hung by the dining-room door on the left, hoping somehow to influence the weather for the good. Or we could go straight out by what had been the front door ofthe brown-staircase house into the garden. Or we could visit the dining-room and possibly be invited to have a peach or fig. Or we might go down the lowest and uncarpeted flight of stairs to the cellar where the furnace for the hot-water pipes lived and Ernest dealt with the knives and boots. Or, and this was our choice at the moment, we could visit the pretty parlourmaid Annie at her work. Her pantry was to the right, below our parents’ bedroom and, according to the peculiar arrangement of the house, was also the only means of getting to the smoking-room unless one went out into the garden by the brown staircase door, or the blue staircase door, or the back door of the hall passage and round by the hole where the garden roller and the hose were kept and in again by the garden door. So that if the servants were having tea in the pantry and it happened to be wet, the master of the house and his friends had to put on raincoats and go round in procession.
    I have so many recollections of frenzied dashes through the rain from