MRS TEWLER would let no nurse girl intervene between herself and her “Precious.” During his lays, she herself, proud and vigilant¹, wheeled him out in his little perambulator every day up Camden Hill or into Regent’s Park. When Edward Albert showed signs of friendliness³ towards dogs, and reached out at them, saying! “Bow-wow, Bow-wow,” she intervened. “Never touch a strange dog,” she said. “They bite. They bite and give you hydrophobia and you go mad and run about biting people. And then thy go mad too.”

Something in the eye of the small boy suggested that this was not an altogether unattractive idea, “And you scream when you see water and you die in awful agony,” she said. That gleam of hope faded.

Cats too Edward Albert was trained to shun⁴. “They have pins in their toes,” and sometimes these can be very poisonous pins. Lots of people have caught things from a cat’s scratches. They bring measles⁵ into the house. They don’t love you even when they purr. And then she heard a terrible story that had to be repeated at once to the cherished darling, of a cat, being petted, purring in the lap of its little mistress, and it watched her eyes, it kept on watching her eyes, and suddenly it sprang at them with its claws out. . . .

After that Edward Albert developed an antipathy⁶ for cats, and declared he could not endure them in the same room.with him. He was cat-allergic, as people say nowadays, in their bright, inexact way. But at times cats got near him unobserved — which wasn’t in accordance with that assertion. Horses too he feared, because he realised they could be equally dangerous to human life at either end. Sheep he was inclined to bully⁷ and run after, until one dreadful day in Regent’s Park an old ram² suddenly turned on him and stamped and stood his ground, Whereupon he fled screaming to his mother, who, pale but

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