The Vicar observed that, had we been older, we would
have found his church very interesting architecturally, when my
nine-year-old brother remarked quite casually, "Where we are, it is
decorated 1307-1377, but by the organ it's Early English, 1189-1307."
The clergyman, no doubt, thought him a precocious little prig, but
from perpetually playing Architectural Quartettes, this little piece
of information came instinctively from him, for he had absorbed it
unconsciously.
Another set we habitually played was entitled "Famous Travellers," and
even after the lapse of fifty-six years, many of the names still stick
in my memory. For instance under "North Africa" came 2, Jules Gerard;
3, Earth; 4, Denham and Clapperton. Jules Gerard's name was familiar
to me, for was he not, like the illustrious Tartarin de Tarascon, a
_tueur de lions_? It was, indeed, Jules Gerard's example which
first fired the imagination of the immortal Tarasconnais, though
personally I confess to a slight feeling of disappointment at learning
from Gerard's biographer that, in spite of his grandiloquent title,
his total bag of lions in eleven years was only twenty-five. As to the
German, Heinrich Earth, my knowledge of him is of the slightest, and I
plead guilty to complete ignorance about Denham and Clapperton's
exploits, though their names seem more suggestive of a firm of
respectable family solicitors or of a small railway station on a
branch line, than of two distinguished travellers.
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