When facing some adverse conditions that threatened our peace as a family he might say:

`Oh well, we've never died in a winter yet!'

Or again at a time when he had hardly a penny to bless himself with, he might spring a riddle like this on us:

`What is the difference between me and a millionaire?'

The answer was:

`Well he has started on his SECOND million, I've only started on my

FIRST!'

Once at the tea table he caught us all napping by springing on us the question:

`Who killed Cain?'. We all yelled out `Abel!'

On page xii is a drawing I made of my father when I was about nineteen and he was about fifty-one or two.

Two names were held in great respect in our home, and were familiar in our mouths as household words,

namely, Charles Dickens, and William Ewart Gladstone, my father continuing the Liberalism of his grandfather, of

whom we have spoken on page 17. The fact that within five minutes walk there was a `Ragged School' of about

four hundred children, coupled with the further fact that the street was our playground, and that many of the boys

I mixed were little blackguards, but emphasises the overshadowing grace of the Lord in those formative yet

unspiritual days.

The streets of course were not so lined with traffic as they are today, and street sellers added a little to the

otherwise drab surroundings.

An old man would come along in tattered clothing with a little white toy lamb fastened to the brim of his hat,

singing in a cracked old voice:

`Young lambs to sell. Young lambs to sell.

If I'd as much money as I could tell

I would not be crying young lambs to sell'.

Another with a basket on his arm, would walk along saying in a grumpy voice:

`All brown `uns. All brown `uns.

Gravesend Shrimps. All brown `uns'.

Insecticides were unknown, but one man, wearing an old top hat to which was fastened a sheet of sticky paper,

would be heard calling:

`Catch `em alive O'

`As through the streets Fly Papers I cry

The boys holloa after me, bother your eye.

Catch `em alive O'.

In Little Dorrit, Dickens, speaking about some old pictures, says:

`Such coats of varnish that every holy personage served as a fly-trap, and became what is now called in the

vulgar tongue a Catch `em alive O'.