asked him whether he had seen the peacock. "I said yes, and the nurse said no, and my mother made me kneel down and beg God to forgive me for not speaking the truth." At the age of four the child was told by a cousin of the age of six that "God had a book in which He wrote down everything we did wrong. This so terrified me for days that I remember being found by my mother sitting under a kind of writing-table in great fear. I never forgot this at any time in my life," the Cardinal tells us, "and it has been a great grace to me." When he was nine years old he "devoured the Apocalypse; and I never all through my life forgot the 'lake that burneth with fire and brimstone.' That verse has kept me like an audible voice through all my life, and through worlds of danger in my youth."
At Harrow the worlds of danger were already around him; but yet he listened to the audible voice. "At school and college I never failed to say my prayers, so far as memory serves me, even for a day." And he underwent another religious experience: he read Paley's Evidences. "I took in the whole argument," wrote Manning, when he was over seventy, "and I thank God that nothing has ever shaken it." Yet on the whole he led the unspiritual life of an ordinary schoolboy. We have glimpses of him as a handsome lad, playing cricket, or strutting about in tasselled Hessian top-boots. And on one occasion at least he gave proof of a certain dexterity of conduct which deserved to be remembered. He went out of bounds, and a master, riding by and seeing him on the other side of a field, tied his horse to a gate, and ran after him. The astute youth outran the master, fetched a circle, reached the gate, jumped on to the horse's back and rode off. For this he was very properly chastised; but of what use was chastisement? No whipping, however severe, could have eradicated from little Henry's mind a quality at least as firmly planted in it as his fear of Hell and his belief in the arguments of Paley.
