170 PRÆTERITA-I

connivance of waiters, Anne and I got in, somehow, mixed up with the dessert. I believe I was rather a pretty boy then, and dressed in a not wholly civilian manner, in a sort of laced and buttoned surtout. My mind was extremely set on watching the instrumental manœuvres of the band,-with admiration of all, but burning envy of the drummer.

The colonel took notice of my rapt attention, and sent an ensign to bring me round to him; and after getting, I know not how, at my mind in the matter, told me I might go and ask the drummer to give me his lovely round-headed sticks, and he would. I was in two minds to do it, having good confidence in my powers of keeping time. But the dismal shyness conquered:-I shook my head woefully, and my musical career was blighted. No one will ever know what I could then have brought out of that drum, or (if my father had perchance taken me to Spain) out of a tambourine.

197. My mother, busy in graver matters, had never cultivated the little she had been taught of music, though her natural sensibility to it was great. Mrs. Richard Gray used sometimes to play gracefully to me, but if ever she struck a false note, her husband used to put his fingers in his ears, and dance about the room, exclaiming, “O Mary, Mary dear!” and so extinguish her. Our own Perth Mary played dutifully her scales, and little more; but I got useful help, almost unconsciously, from a family of young people who ought, if my chronology had been systematic, to have been affectionately spoken of long ago.

In above describing my father’s counting-house,¹ I said the door was opened by a latch pulled by the head clerk. This head clerk, or, putting it more modestly, topmost of two clerks, Henry Watson, was a person of much import in my father’s life and mine; import which, I perceive, looking back, to have been as in many respects tender

¹ [See § 153 (p. 134).]

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