In his Harrow holidays down here my brother was telling one of my great-aunts such yarns that my sister wrote off to my father, 12 August 1862, “He teazes her dreadfully, and tells her the most extraordinary things about the Exhibition. When she asked him if all the boys dined together at school, he told her that half dined at the King’s Head and the other half at the Turk’s, and those that were not hungry could have a chop and bottle of stout in their rooms.” It was not so: at any rate, in my time.
He usually was very accurate, feeling that exaggeration spoiled a narrative of facts. Keep strictly to the facts, or launch out boldly into fiction. On the same principle he would not give a sixpence to relieve a case of destitution; but if the case was put before him and he was asked for twenty pounds, he might perhaps give the twenty, feeling that it might do good where sixpences were wasted. He did not often waste his money; but one evening on coming out of a theatre he meant to throw a sixpence to a man who found a hansom for us, and threw him a half-sovereign by mistake, and I heard the man say fervently, “Thank God, all the Gentlemen aren’t dead.”
With his prodigious memory my brother could have written books of this sort far better than I have written these; and I am sorry I did not oftener make sure of things by asking him. (He died five-and-twenty years ago.) As it is, I have left out things of which I am not sure; and some of these things were quite worth saying, if true; but I wished to keep as closely as I could to facts.
I once was telling a man a thing I thought would interest him; and he stopped me short—“I heard that from your brother, and shan’t forget it. I was out in Kensington Gardens with my wife, before we married, and he came up and told us that; and I didn’t want it then. I had just that moment proposed to her, and she had not had time to reply.” I hope I have not said anything here that has been heard before, like that.