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There was Herodotus, and The Swiss Family Robinson, and Gulliver’s Travels; Pamela, and a first edition of Alice (Gran’papa approved of Tenniel) and three or four single poems, each a book to itself, with a profusion of bright-coloured illustrations—Gilpin, The Elegy on a Mad Dog, The Three Jovial Hunstmen, and Laura’s favourite, So She went into the Garden to get a Cabbage Leaf. There was the Churchman’s Family Bible, with Adam in voluminous goatskin draperies, and Eve with hair like Mother, and square capital letters at the beginning of chapters with tiny pictures filled into them. There were the Cruikshanks—huge albums into which Gran’papa had pasted every print or drawing of his favourite artist that he had come across in fifty magpie years. And there was Mr. Punch, immortal Mr. Punch, endless volumes of him, inexhaustible, a mine of delight, and the true explanation of the singular and detailed acquaintance with Victorian politics with which Laura of the tenacious memory could, on occasion, confound an opponent. Pouring over the cartoons, devouring the antiquated letter-press as only a small child can, she had bewildered Aunt Adela one day on a visit to Madame Tussaud, by her delighted recognition of group after group of Her Majesty’s Ministers who had died before she was born. She adored Lord Salisbury, for instance, and pitied him deeply for losing his wife, for she had him thoroughly entangled with The Lord of Burleigh. But her favourites were naughty Randolph, the mustachioed schoolboy, being very rude to Mr. Gladstone, and ‘Joey,’ whose speeches in that last tragic tour she cut out and kept and learned by heart, and would declaim unweariedly to the looking-glass and the indifferent twins, and who was nevertheless inextricably confused in her teeming, unfocussed mind with her one delirious pantomime and Mr. Alfred Jingle.