1864 329 Church is one of the most remarkable differences between the times when I was a boy and when, as now, I am an octogenarian. My father had originally intended me for the army, and proposed sending me to Woolwich, to be trained for the Engineers ; but, owing to my delicacy of lungs, or supposed delicacy, the time passed in which I could be admitted to Woolwich, and the plan of sending me into the army was abandoned. I quite allow that my father was in perplexity as to what to do with his three sons. I had upset his well-laid schemes ; he rubbed his chin, and puzzled over the matter, and could not see any alternative. Meanwhile I remained at Hurstpierpoint for eight years. I am sure that my father worried all through those years at the problem before him—and could find no solution to it. To complicate matters, he had married again, and become the father of two more children, a son and a daughter. So now there were four youths who were to be provided for. But by this time my father had come to the conclusion that children's minds were not blank sheets which a parent might twist into a cornet, or fold into half a dozen shapes as pleased his fancy. So, very sensibly, he let my half-brother choose his own course, and as to my own two brothers and myself he waited to see how matters would eventually turn out, and let chance rule. When both my brothers refused to read for Orders in order that one or other might take the Rectory of Lew, and when my mother, having seen the bent of my mind, finally, before she died, gave her consent, then my father reluctantly withdrew his opposition. Sir Thomas Fairfax said to the Archbishop of York : " One son I sent to the Netherlands to train him as a soldier, and he makes a tolerable County Justice, but is a mere coward at fighting ; my next I sent to Cambridge, and he proves a good lawyer, but a mere dunce at divinity ; my youngest I sent to the Inns of Court, and he is a good divine, but nobody at the law." My father put it down to perversity on my part that I did not take up with mechanics. He saw what a great opening there'was for one who was not only a skilled mechanic, but had imagination, and could invent. But I had not the faculty. Like Tristram Shandy I could say : " Of all things in the world, I understand the least of mochanism. I have neither genius, nor taste, nor
