heartily, but not so my father on board the yacht.
Bletchington was a much milder person and, besides being a beautiful sailor, one of the gentlest and most beautiful-mannered mariners I have ever met. He was invariably optimistic, and always said there was a nice breeze. This sometimes tempted the girls, who were bad sailors, to go out sailing, but they always regretted it and used to come back saying, “How foolish we were to be taken in!” Hugo and I were good sailors and enjoyed the yacht more than anything. John was an expert in the handling of a yacht, but the “Imp” nearly died of sea-sickness if ever he ventured on board.
Captain Bletchington taught Hugo and myself a song in Fiji language. It ran like this:
“Tang a rang a chicky nee, picky-nicky wooa,
Tarra iddy ucky chucky chingo.”
Which meant:
“All up and down the river they did go;
The King and Queen of Otahiti.”
I think what we enjoyed most of all were games of Hide-and-seek on board. One day one of the sailors hid us by reefing us up in a sail in the sail-room, a hiding-place which baffled everyone. The Waterwitch was a fast vessel, and won the schooners’ race round the Isle of Wight one year and only narrowly missed winning the Queen’s Cup. The story of this race used to be told us over and over again by D., and used to be enacted by Hugo and me on our toy yachts or with pieces of cork in the sink. This is what happened. Another schooner, the Cetonia, had to allow the Waterwitch five minutes, but the Waterwitch had to allow the Sleuthhound, a cutter, twenty-five minutes. D. was watching from the shore, and my mother was watching from the R.Y.S. Club. The Cetonia came in first, but a minute or two later the Waterwitch sailed in before the five minutes’ allowance was up. Then twenty minutes of dreadful suspense rolled by, twenty-three minutes, and during the last two minutes, as D. dramatically said, “That ’orrid Sleuthhound sailed round the corner and won the race.” Hugo and I felt we could never forgive the owner of the Sleuthhound.
Besides the Waterwitch there was a little steam launch called the Wasp which used to take us in to Plymouth, and John had a sailing-boat of his own.
CHAPTER IV
MEMBLAND
In the summer holidays of 1883 Mr. Warre came to stay with us. John, Cecil, and Everard were at his house at Eton. Cecil was to read with him during the holidays. Cecil was far the cleverest one of the family and a classical scholar.
Mr. Warre was pleased to find I was interested in the stories of the Greek heroes, but pained because I only knew their names in French, speaking of Thesée, Medée, and Egée. The truth being that I did not know how to pronounce their names in English, as I had learnt all about them from Chérie. Chérie said that Mr. Warre had “une tête bien equilibrée.” We performed Les Enfants d’Édouard before him.
The following Christmas, Mr. Warre sent Hugo a magnificent book illustrating the song “Apples no more,” with water-colour drawings done by his daughter; and he sent me Church’s Stories from Homer, with this Latin inscription at the beginning of it:
MAURICIO BARING
Jam ab ineunte aetate
Veterum fautori
antiquitatis studioso
Maeonii carminis argumenta
Anglice enucleata
Streniâ propitiâ
mittit
EDMUNDUS WARRE
Kal. Jan.
mdccclxxxiii.
Nobody in the house knew what the Latin word streniâ meant, not even Walter Durnford, who was then an Eton master and destined to be the house tutor of Hugo and myself later. But Chérie at once said it meant the feast of the New Year. The scholars were puzzled and could not conceive how she had known this. The French word étrennes had given her the clue.
The whole of my childhood was a succession of crazes for one thing after another: the first one, before I was three, was a craze for swans, then came trains, then chess, then carpentry, then organs and organ-building. My mother played chess, and directly I learnt the game I used to make all the visitors play with me. My mother used to say that she had once bet my Aunt Effie she would beat her twenty-one games running, giving her a pawn every time. She won twenty games and was winning the twenty-first, late one night after dinner, when my father said they had played long enough, and must go to bed, which of course they refused to do. He then upset the board, and my mother said she had never been so angry in her life; she had bent back his little finger and had, she hoped, really hurt him.
I can remember playing chess and beating Admiral Glyn, who came over from Plymouth. His ship was the Agincourt, a large four-funnelled ironclad. One day we had luncheon on board, and my father was chaffed for an unforgettable solecism, namely, for having smoked on the quarter-deck.
Another craze was history. Chérie gave the girls a most interesting historical task, which was called doing Le Siècle de Péricles and Le Siècle de Louis XIV., or whose-ever the century might be.
You wrote on one side of a copy-book the chief events and dates of the century in question, and on the other side short biographies of the famous men who adorned it, with comments on their deeds or works. I implored to be allowed to do this, and in a large sprawling handwriting I struggled with Le Siècle de Péricles, making up for my want of penmanship by the passionate admiration I felt for the great men of the past. My History of the World was the opposite to that of Mr. H. G. Wells!
Somebody gave me an American History of the World, a large flat book which told the histories of all the countries of the world in the form of a pictured chart, the countries being represented by long, narrow belts or strips, so that you could follow the destinies of the various Empires running parallel to each other and see the smaller countries being absorbed by the greater. The whole book was printed on a long, large, glazed linen sheet, which you could pull out all at one time if you had a room long enough and an unencumbered door. You could also turn over the doubly folded leaves. That was the more convenient way, although you did not get the full effect. This book was a mine of interest. It had pictures of every kind of side-issue and by-event, such as the Seven Wonders of the World, the Coliseum, pictures of crusaders, and portraits of famous men.
About the same time a friend of Cecil’s, Claud Lambton, gave me an historical atlas which was also a great treat. Lessons continued with Chérie, and I used to learn passages of Racine (“Le Récit de Theramène”) and of Boileau (“La Mollesse,” from the Lutrin) by heart, and “Les Imprécations de Camille.” I also read a good deal by myself, but mostly fairy-tales, although there were one or two grown-up books I read and liked. The book I remember liking best of all was a novel called Too Strange not to be True, by Lady Georgiana Fullerton, which my mother read out to my cousin, Bessie Bulteel. I thought this a wonderful book; I painted illustrations for it, making a picture of every character.
There was another book which I read to myself and liked, if anything, still better. I found it in Everard’s bedroom. It was a yellow-backed
