One Sunday he had drawn a most
spirited and hotly-contested "finish" to a steeplechase. When
remonstrated with on the ground that it was not a "Sunday"
subject, he pointed to the church steeple and said, "You don't
understand. This is Sunday, and those jockeys are all racing to
see which of them can get to church first," which strikes me as a
peculiarly ready and ingenious explanation for a child of six.
In London we all went on Sundays to the Scottish Presbyterian
Church in Crown Court, just opposite Drury Lane Theatre. Dr.
Cumming, the minister of the church at that time, enjoyed an
immense reputation amongst his congregation. He was a very
eloquent man, but was principally known as always prophesying the
imminent end of the world. He had been a little unfortunate in
some of the dates he had predicted for the final cataclysm, these
dates having slipped by uneventfully without anything whatever
happening, but finally definitely fixed on a date in 1867 as the
exact date of the Great Catastrophe. His influence with his flock
rather diminished when it was found that Dr.
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