If he had to go out alone he always crossed the fields, and never went by the wood; wandering in a wood at night was a childish nightmare of a peculiarly horrible kind.
I quote a few childish stories about him, selecting them out of a large number.
His mother saying to him one day that the gardener was dead, he burst out laughing (with that curious hysteria so common in children), and then after a little asked if they were going to bury him.
His mother, wishing to familiarize him with the idea of continued existence after death, dwelt on the fact that it was only his body that was going to be buried: his soul was in heaven.
The boy said presently, "If his body is in the churchyard, and his soul in heaven, where is David ?" Upon which his mother sent him down to the farm.
He was often singularly old-fashioned in his ways.

If he was kept indoors by a childish ailment, he would draw his chair up to the fire, by his nurse, and say, "Now that the children are gone out, nurse, we can have a quiet talk." And he always returned first of all his brothers and sisters, if they were playing in the garden, that he might have the pleasure of clapping his hands from the nursery window to summon them in.

"Children, children, come in," he used to say.
A curious little dialogue is preserved by his aunt in a diary.

He laughed so immoderately at something that was said at lunch by one of his elders, that when his father inquired what the joke was, he was unable to answer.

"It must be something very funny," said his mother in explanation.