as he always looked when his rudderless imagination was once well launched, and I heard him mutter, ’Hamlet—­the Amleth of Saxo-Grammaticus,—­hamalet, “that which is suspended.”  The world, to Hamlet’s metaphysical mind, was “suspended” in the wide region of Nowhere—­in an infinite ocean of Nothing.  Why did I not think of this before?  Strange that this child should hit upon it.’  Then looking at me as though he had just seen me for the first time in his life, he said.  ‘How old are you, child?’ ’Eighteen, father, I said.  ’Eighteen years?’ he asked.  ‘Yes, father,’ I said with some pique.  ’Did you suppose I meant eighteen months?’ ‘Only eighteen years,’ he muttered, ’a mere baby, in short; and yet he has hit upon what we Shakespearians have been boggling over for many year?—­the symbolical meaning involved in Hamlet’s name.  Henry, I prophesy great things for you.’

An intimacy was cemented between us at once.  One of the results of this conversation was my father’s elaborate paper, read before one of his societies, in which he maintained that Shakespeare’s Hamlet was a metaphysical poem, the great central idea of which was involved in the name Hamlet, Amleth, or Hamalet—­the idea that the universe, suspended in the wide region of Nowhere, lies, an amulet, upon the breast of the Great Latona,—­a paper that was the basis of his reputation in ‘the higher criticism.’

Shortly after this my father and I spent the autumn in various parts of Switzerland.  One night, when we were sitting outside the chalet in the full light of the moon, I was the witness of a display of passion on the part of one whom I had always considered to be a dreamy book-worm—­a passionless, eccentric mystic—­that simply amazed me.  A flickering tongue from the central fires suddenly breaking up through the soil of an English vegetable garden could hardly have been a more unexpected phenomenon to me than what occurred on that memorable night.

The incident I am going to relate showed me how rash it is to suppose that you have really fathomed the personality of any human creature.  The mementos of his first wife, which accompanied him whithersoever he went, absorbed his attention in Switzerland, and especially in the little place where she was born, far more than they had done at home.  He was for ever peeping furtively into his escritoire to enjoy the sight of them, and then looking over his shoulder to see if he was being watched by my mother, though she was far away in Raxton Hall.  On the night in question he showed me the silver casket containing certain of these mementos—­mementos which I felt to be almost too intimate to be shown even to his son.