I am only too conscious of the impertinence of this heading: What value could such memories have? And how far are they trustworthy? Yet they are my memories, and though some sixty years have elapsed, they remain as fresh in my mind as though they had happened but yesterday.

When I was just over four years old my mother took me to a dairy kept by a Mr. Godwin, who had been Newman’s butler in Ireland. He put me on his knee and said: “Do you know Jack Smallman?” I did, for Smallman—whom I had always thought of as Mister Smallman—was a carpenter who fascinated me by working with saw and chisels, which I longed to handle. “Well,” said Godwin, “I was JJr. .Newman s butler and the lad Smallman was the ‘buttons!.” I saw my mother smiling at this; she was probably wondering what I was making of the term ‘buttons’.

“Young Smallman,” continued the old man, “was sometimes impertinent. So one day I put him over my knee and smacked him well” I gasped at the bare idea of smacking the man of chisels and saws. Gut the old man continued: “What do you think that lad said when I had done my duty by him? He said to me: ‘You must feel very exhausted after that, Mr. Godwin. Let me draw you a glass of beer’.” *

A few years later, it must have been in 1878 or 1879, a man leaning on the gate, which in those days separated the school premises from the part of the cloister by which people came to church, astonished me by saying: “Say, I reckon if I hang on this gate long enough I might see ‘Nooman’ pass this way?” I was very doubtful, for I had never seen the future Cardinal there.