282 EARLY REMINISCENCES persecutest thou me?" but as he pronounced Saul—Shahoul, Shahoul ! and gave it out with a " howl," he set all the boys tittering. When he left Hurst in a cab, he placed his portmanteau in the bottom, put the cushions on the top, lit his pipe, sat on the erection and dangling his legs out of the window, spat forth between his knees. The Rev. E. C. Lowe was the head master of Hurst, a very able man, and I got on very well with him. He had been curate of Ottery S. Mary, in Devon, where he married one of the Cole-ridges, but had no children. A son of the Rev. G. C. Gorham, vicar of Bampford Speke, was one of the masters, but in no way shared in his father's heterodoxy, and was a good sound Churchman, very kindly and much beloved by all who knew him. Another master was one of thePhilpotts'. He was a most absent-minded man. Having been invited one day to a garden-party at a distant country house, as the day was hot he soaped his head before starting, but forgot to wash the soap out. When he arrived, having walked fast, and having often passed his hand over his head, he presented a spectacle as if he wore a white wig—it was one froth of lather. When at Hurst one day the head master, Dr. Lowe, sent to me his German class. I was staggered. I had not spoken a word of German or read a German book since 1844 and fifteen years had elapsed ; after leaving Deutschland I had been so much in France that I had come to talk and to think in French. To my surprise I found that the language came back to me with a rush, and as, at the time, I was learning Icelandic and had only an Icelandic grammar in German, I again read that language. Later, at Cologne when I attended the Alt-Catholik Congress, I found that I could follow the speeches with great facility. Going into a bookseller's shop, the seller said to me, " Pardon, sir, but you puzzle me. You have the German Aussprache such as few Englishmen possess, but you make blunders in the gender of some of the nouns." " That is easily explained," said I. " I left Germany as a child of ten, and have not spoken a word of it since." " Now I understand," said he. My eldest son was a pupil in Freiburg in 1881 when aged ten years, but only for six months. Then he returned to England,
