sometimes in his gesticulating hand, as he became diverted by his

talk from his original exasperation…

This particular afternoon is nodoubt mixed up in mymemory with

many other afternoons; all sorts of things my father said and did at

different times have gotthemselves referred to it; it filled me at

the time with a great unprecedented sense of fellowship and it has

become the symbol now for all our intercourse together. If I didn't

understand the things he said, I did the mood he was in. He gave me

two very broad ideas in that talk and the talks I have mingled with

it; he gave them to me very clearly and they have remained

fundamental in mymind; one a sense of the extraordinaryconfusion

and waste and planlessness of the human life that went on all about

us; and the other of a great ideal of order and economy which he

called variously Science and Civilisation, and which, though I do

notremember that he ever used that word, I suppose many people

nowadays would identify with Socialism,-as the Fabians expound it.

He was not very definite about this Science, you mustunderstand,

but he seemed always to be waving his hand towards it,-just as his

contemporary Tennyson seems always to be doing-he belonged to his

age and mostly his talk was destructive of thelimited beliefs of

his time, he led me to infer rather than actually told me that this

Science was coming, aspirit of light and order, to the rescue of a

world groaning and travailing in muddle for the want of it…

5

When Ithink of Bromstead nowadays I find it inseparably bound up

with the disorders of my father's gardening, and the odd patchings

and paintings that disfigured his houses. It was all of a piece

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