THE RETROSPECT

BY

ADA CAMBRIDGE

AUTHOR OF

"THIRTY YEARS IN AUSTRALIA," "PATH AND GOAL," ETC.

LONDON

STANLEY PAUL & CO.

31 ESSEX STREET, STRAND, W.C.

COLONIAL EDITION.

1912

TO

MY FRIENDS, KNOWN AND UNKNOWN

WHO WERE YOUNG AND HAVE GROWN OLD WITH ME

I DEDICATE THIS BOOK

[CONTENTS]

[I. Coming Home]
[II. About Town]
[III. In Beautiful England]
[IV. The Home of Childhood]
[V. Halcyon Days]
[VI. Earliest Recollections]
[VII. Old Times and New]
[VIII. Some Early Sundays]
[IX. My Grandfather's Days]
[X. Outdoor Life]
[XI. At the Seaside]
[XII. Excursions to Sandringham]
[XIII. A Trip South]
[XIV. "Devon, Glorious Devon!"]
[XV. In the Garden of England]

[CHAPTER I]

COMING HOME

There was a gap of thirty-eight years, almost to a day, between my departure from England (1870), a five-weeks-old young bride, and my return thither (1908), an old woman. And for about seven-eighths of that long time in Australia, while succeeding very well in making the best of things, I was never without a subconscious sense of exile, a chronic nostalgia, that could hardly bear the sight of a homeward-bound ship. This often-tantalised but ever-unappeased desire to be back in my native land wore the air of a secret sorrow gently shadowing an otherwise happy life, while in point of fact it was a considerable source of happiness in itself, as I now perceive. For where would be the interest and inspiration of life without something to want that you cannot get, but that it is open to you to try for? I tried hard to bridge the distance to my goal for over thirty years, working, planning, failing, starting again, building a thousand air-castles, more or less, and seeing them burst like soap-bubbles as soon as they began to materialise; then I gave up. The children had grown too old to be taken; moreover, they had attained to wills of their own and did not wish to go. One had fallen to the scythe of the indiscriminate Reaper, and that immense loss dwindled all other losses to nothing at all. I cared no more where I lived, so long as the rest were with me. In England my father and mother, who had so longed for me, as I for them, were in their graves; no old home was left to go back to. I was myself a grandmother, in spite of kindly and even vehement assurances that I did not look it; more than that, I could have been a great-grandmother without violating the laws of nature. At any rate, I felt that I was past the age for enterprises. It was too late now, I concluded, and so what was the use of fussing any more? In short, I sat down to content myself with the inevitable.

I was doing it. I had been doing it for several years. The time had come when I could look out of window any Tuesday morning, watch a homeward-bound mail-boat put her nose to sea, and turn from the spectacle without a pang. The business of building air-castles flourished, as of yore, but their bases now rested on Australian soil. What was left of the future was all planned out, satisfactorily, even delightfully, and England was not in it.

Then was the time for the unexpected to happen, and it did. A totally undreamed-of family legacy, with legal business attached to it, called my husband home. Even then it did not strike me that I was called too; for quite a considerable time it did not strike him either. But there befell a period of burning summer heat, the intensity and duration of which broke all past records of our State and established it as a historic event for future Government meteorologists; the weaklings of the community succumbed to it outright or emerged from it physically prostrate, and I, who had encountered it in a "run-down" condition, was of the latter company. The question: "Was I fit to be left?" obtruded itself into the settled policy: it logically resolved itself into the further question: "Was I fit to go?" There was nothing whatever to prevent my going if I could "stand" it, and a long sea-voyage had been doctors' prescription for me for years. Mysteriously and, as it were, automatically, I brisked up from the moment the second question was propounded, and before I knew it found myself enrolled as a member of the expedition. The two-berth cabin was engaged; travelling trunks, and clothes to put in them, bestrewed my bedroom floor. I was going home—at last!

And was it too late? Had I outlived my long, long hope? Not a bit of it. I had outlived nothing, and it was exactly and ideally the right time. "You will be disappointed," said more than one of my travelled old friends, who had known the extravagance of my anticipations. "It will be sad for you, finding all so strange and changed." "You will feel dreadfully out of it, after so many years." "You will be very lonely"—thus was I compassionately warned not to let a too sanguine spirit run away with me. They were all wrong. I never had a disappointment: nothing was sad for me, of all the change; no one could have been less out of it, or less lonely. Every English day of the whole six months was full of pleasure; I was not even bored for an hour. At no time of my life could I have made the trip with a lighter heart (being assured weekly that all was well behind me). Children would have meant a burden, however precious a burden, and had I gone in my parents' lifetime it would have been with them and me as our ship's captain said it was with his wife during his brief sojourns with her; for half the time she was overwrought with the joy of his return, and for the other half miserable in anticipation of his departure, so that he never knew her in her normal state. That my father and mother had long been dead, and that the tragedies of home love and loss, with which I was so familiar, were not pressing close about me, probably accounted more than anything else for my being so well and happy. Also, it is not until a woman is sixty, or thereabouts, that she is really free to enjoy herself.

Well! I never was so well since I was born. The long sea-voyage did all that was asked of it, and incidentally brought home to me the truth of the old adage that silver lines all clouds. "If only we were not so far away!" had been my inward wail for eight and thirty years. "If only we had emigrated to Canada, or South Africa, or almost any part of the British Empire but this! Then we might have flown home every few years as easily as we now go from Melbourne to Sydney, and at no more expense." I have the same regret, intensified, now that I am back in Australia again. But there is no gain without its corresponding loss. Not only might the joys of England after exile have become staled by this time, but a voyage of a week or two would not have prepared me to make the most of them. I am convinced that years of health and life are given to those who, at the right juncture, can afford six weeks of sea-travel at a stretch, and they may have been given to me and my companion; I quite believe so. Each of us was a stone heavier at the end of our holiday than at the beginning, and in the interval we forgot that we were a day over twenty-five.

Consider for a moment the perfect adjustment of the conditions to the needs of the invalid with no disease but exhaustion. I pass over the special favours vouchsafed to me, in idyllic weather and tranquil seas, and the mothering of a devoted stewardess who is my friend for life; also in finding quiet and pleasant company in a saloon party of but eighteen. That sort of luck cannot be purchased even with a first-class steamer ticket, nor is it necessary to the efficacy of the treatment. Take only the itinerary—that of the Suez route at a suitable season—as it may be observed by anybody.

First, the run across the Indian Ocean—in the case of the mail-steamers from Adelaide to Colombo, in our case from Adelaide to Aden. Three whole weeks, without a break, without an incident, if all goes well. I had never imagined the sea could be so blank as it presented itself to us on this first section of our voyage. Ships may have passed in the night, but I saw none by day; no land, no birds, no whales, no phosphorescent wakes, no anything, except sea and sky and lovely sunsets. It may have been monotonous, but it was monotony in the right place. It brought to me, at the outset, that complete rest from all effort and excitement which was the necessary preliminary to recovery and repair. I reposed on my comfortable lounge from morn till eve, playing with a trifle of needlework (too stupid with blissful torpor to read, while the strangeness of quite idle hands would have induced the fidgets, sea-drugged as I was). I ate, and slept, and basked, like a soulless animal; forgot there were such things as posts and newspapers, as dinner-planning and stocking-mending, as calls and committee-meetings; forgot that I was the mother of a family, and had abandoned it for the first time in history; forgot whether I was ill or well, or had nerves or not; and thus soaked and steeped and soddened in peace, insensibly renewed and established my strength, not patching it anyhow just to carry on with, as one does on land, with a casual week at a watering-place or in the mountains, but unhurriedly, uninterruptedly, solidly, rebuilding it from the bottom up.

Then, when strength becomes aware that it is ready for use—at the moment when one begins to feel that the monotony has lasted long enough—then back comes the delightful world, with a new face of beauty to match the new ardour of love for it that has been silently generating within us. All the light of enterprising and romantic youth was in the gaze I levelled through my binoculars (given to me for my voyage in 1870) at the first substantial token that I was in the gorgeous East, one of the fairylands of imagination (comprising, roughly, all the unknown earth) from the days of infancy when I learned to read. It was an Arab dhow. I knew that pointed wing as well as I knew the shape of chimney-pots, but the wonder that I was seeing it with my bodily eyes, even as a speck upon the horizon, was overwhelming. I stared and stared, but could not speak.

The rest was pure enchantment. As we drew near to the magnificent rock of Aden—hateful place, I know, to its white inhabitants, and an old tale not worth mentioning to the average Australian tourist—I said, in my ecstasy: "This pays for the voyage, if we see nothing more." The first white-awninged launch that bustled up to us, manned by two nondescripts, one huge Nubian negro and one beautiful Somali boy, bore through the brilliant air and water an official gentleman who probably would have sold his soul for a London fog; it was not he, but another official gentleman who swallowed nearly a bottle of ship's brandy while attending to ship's business, and was presented with another bottle on his departure by a sympathiser who understood his case. It was a hot morning in the middle of May, and I had been accustomed from my youth to atmospheric light and colour as glorious as the radiant setting of this strange outpost of Empire in the East. Evidently it is in the eye (backed by a strong imagination) of the gazer that poetic beauty lies.

After this, the unspeakable experiences followed thick and fast. Night in the Straits, with Venus so bright that she cast a reflection like moonlight across the water; the Red Sea in the morning—minarets on the horizon, and those rocks of desolation, with the loneliest human dwelling conceivable (the arcaded lighthouse) on the top of one of the most impressively desolate; that other lighthouse at the gulf entrance, with its flashing rays of red and white, its rock-base velvety purple against a solemn sunset sky; Mount Sinai amongst the hills of Holy Land; the majestic desert of so many dreams. Time was when I sniffed at the colour of Holman Hunt's "Scapegoat" landscape, but here it was, translated into living light, but no fainter in tint than the dead paint had made it. Sapphires were not in it with that blue-green sea at Suez, in which the jostling bumboats floated as in clearest glass. The rocky shores to left were mauve, the right-hand desert and Holman-Hunty hummocks salmon-pink, and no mortal painter was ever born, or ever will be, to "get" the bloomy glow and fairy delicacy of Nature's textures and technique. The Eastern sun blazed broadly over the scene, the temperature at noon was ninety-nine degrees in the shade; the composition was perfect.

Between tea-time and dinner we passed out of the city and close to its domestic doorsteps—the closest I had yet come to Eastern life; and long after we were in the canal it was a picture to look back upon from which I could not tear my eyes. Low on the gleaming water—the two towns linked by the dark thread of the railway embankment, brooded over by that majestic mauve and violet hill—it was a vision of beauty indeed as the light effects changed from moment to moment with the sinking of the gorgeous sun. I could afford no time to dress that night. In my hat, as I was, I snatched a mouthful of dinner, and was up again on deck, to make the most of the short twilight; and so I saw the shadowy last of Suez and more than I expected to see of the canal.

"Just a little ditch in the sand," somebody had told me, as one might say, a primrose by the river's brim was nothing more. Apart from its otherwise tremendous significance, that narrow watercourse was a highway of romance to me. Egypt—Arabia—the very names set one's heart thumping. It would be thrilling to be there even if one were blind. The silence of the desert is more eloquent than any sound. But from the most unsentimental point of view it was a ditch of varied aspects, that only the dullest traveller could call uninteresting.

The Canal Company, it appeared, was widening it to double its original measure across, top and bottom—something like a ten years' job, with millions of money and priceless brain-matter in it—and we saw the engineers at work. That is to say, they were not at work at the moment, because the day's task was done; but there were their excavations and machinery, fine and effective, and I can never look at such, apprehending their meaning, without a lifting of the heart, a sense of the beauty that is in the world unrecognised by that name. What, I wondered, did my schoolgirl idol and apostle of beauty, Ruskin, think of this ditch when it was a-making? Did he say? If, to my knowledge, he had called it a desecration of Nature, I should instantly have agreed with him. Now, to my life-educated eyes and soul, the very Holy Land was sanctified by the faithful endeavour and achievement evidenced in haulage-trucks and pipe-lines and those twin steel rails that he hated so much, telling all their serious story to whoever could understand it.

It was indeed a beautiful as well as an instructive picture, that left bank, as we moved beside it. The native labourers, after their work, squatted in their little camps and dug-outs, and in the sand, or stood statue-like to watch our passing, sharply silhouetted figures and groups against the translucent sky, each a "study" that, if in a gallery, one would go miles to see. Strings of camels were being led to water or were wending homeward with their loads. Little encampments straight out of the Bible, desert palm-trees, desert distances, all in the golden afterglow, the clear-shining twilight, the evening peace that was too peaceful for words, were gems for the collector of poetic impressions, to be for ever cherished and preserved. And then how striking was the rare glimpse of a Saxon face, the glance at us of grave eyes that one knew had the all-governing brain behind them. The British Occupation in Egypt—there it was, in the person of that lonely man in tent or boat-house, advance agent of the Civilisation that spells Prosperity in whatever part of the world it goes. One of these, out riding with a lady, rode down to the water's edge to watch us pass. In their white garb they were perfectly groomed, like their beautiful Arab horses, which they sat in a style that was good to see; but they were pathetic figures, with that lonely waste around them. I divined a deadly homesickness in the eyes that followed our progress as long as we could be seen, the same ache of the heart that afflicted me, for so many years, whenever I saw a ship going to England without me. Yet one could be quite sure that they never dreamed of slipping cables on their own account as long as duty to the Empire held them where they were. Not the man, at any rate.

And so it grew too dark to see anything beyond the edge of our searchlight, which showed only post-heads in the water, and I went to bed.

I was asleep when we passed Ismailia, contrary to my intentions, but I got up at four o'clock, to lose no more. Still unbroken desert to the right; to the left a well-made embankment with a roadway atop, and behind that a belt of bamboos and greenery, telegraph lines and a railway, broken at intervals by the oases of the gares. An American navy-boat made way for us at one of these, a pair of submarines conspicuous on her deck. At a little before five the sun of a lovely morning rose on our starboard side, and one saw the desert wet and dark, yielding its immemorial savagery to the civilising hand and brain. One of the fine up-to-date dredges, amongst the many dredges, was pumping the mud up on the land as it sucked it from the canal bottom. In the shining sun-flushed pools of its creation black forms of storks moved statelily, apparently finding nourishment already where there had been none before. On the left bank there was the embodied spirit of progress again, doubtless looking at his work and on the way to expedite it; white-clothed, white-helmeted, enthroned on a railway trolly, which a bare-legged native ran along the line as it were a perambulator on ball bearings, two more natives sitting upon it, ready to take turns with him at the job. Lifting the eye slightly, one saw open water along the sky behind them, a flashing, glittering strip, studded with forty-two lateen sails that might have been carved of mother o' pearl; and almost immediately, straight ahead, a low mass of something as yet misty and formless in the dazzling rose and gold of the morning, reminiscent of Suez in its sunset transfiguration—Port Said, less than an hour from us.

It was Sunday, and divine service in the reading-room had been arranged. Soon after six, at about the time of passing the Gare de Naz-el-ech, passengers began to come up, a few with prayer-book in hand. But divine service was "off," by order of the captain—a religious man, very regular in his attendance at public worship. He knew how it would be at seven-thirty, when we were going to drop anchor in the port at seven, and that was exactly how it was—every inch of ship overrun with ardent pedlars, while coaling from the great lighters, three or four lashed abreast, was in full swing. I may as well say at once that for me, as for nearly all the passengers (my own companion, who declared himself quite happy in his choice, being the only member of the saloon party to stay at home), that Sunday, as a Sunday, has to be wiped off the slate entirely, posted as missing amongst the Sabbath days of life. I must confess further that it was the most delightful (so called) Sunday I ever spent. At last I did more than see the Gorgeous East of lifelong dreams; I felt it, I had speech with it. In a select party, headed by the dear woman who, apart from her solid social position, was the chief pillar of the church on board, I was permitted to go ashore. I had the free use of six hours to do what I liked in.

In the half-hour before breakfast I did exciting business with the bumboatmen. I bought a piece of tapestry, representing camels, palm-trees, mosques and the like, which the native vendor assured me was handmade in Egyptian prisons, though in my heart of hearts I knew better; also brooches and bracelets which seemed dirt cheap at two and three shillings apiece, the exact counterparts of which I afterwards bought at William Whiteley's for sixpence ha'penny. As soon after breakfast as we could get our letters ready, I was rowed through the jewel-bright water into the world of fairy tales. Oh, I know what Port Said is to those familiar with it, and I could have seen for myself, had I wished to see, that the Gorgeous East could be flimsy and tawdry, even ugly, here and there; but it was the East, and that was enough; the glamour of the rosy spectacles beautified all. Nothing was easier than to forget and ignore what would doubtless be impossible to overlook on a second visit, and impossible to put up with on a third or fourth.

Having arrived at the centre of things, we appointed an hour for luncheon at the Hotel Continental, and split our party into twos and threes. An unattached man took charge of me and another unattached lady, and escorted us about the town and to the shops which alone attracted her (for she knew Port Said already). Wonderful shops, too, some of them were, and it was no wasted time I spent roaming about them, while she gave her attention to spangled scarves and lace; but the lattice-veiled windows of the mysterious dwelling-rooms above them, and the flowing and glowing life of the narrow streets, were what I had come to see. It was delightful to return to the pavement under the Continental, and there sit, with a cold and bubbling lemon drink, in one of the low chairs which so hospitably invite the wayfarer, to watch the stream of mingling East and West go by, and its eddies around one—the veiled native lady touching skirts with the breezy English girl; the turbaned sherbet seller, his remarkable brazen ewer under his arm, dodging the swift bicycle; the oily-eyed and sodden rapscallion of the Levant, or the bejewelled and bepowdered person no better than she should be, elbowing the spare young cleric slipping through these dangerous places on his way to the Pan-Anglican Congress. And the stranger contrasts on the wide, tiled side-walk, a continuous outdoor café rather than a promenade—Frenchmen playing dominoes, swarthy traders doing secret business over their drinks; passengers from the various ships in port, mothers and aunts with children by the hand; here and there the habitual tourist, easily identified; here and there the impeccably clothed, clean-limbed white figure, whose high bearing and bluff dignity proclaimed the important person—soldier of distinction, big-game-hunting lord of leisure, powerful Government official, as the case might be. All up and down, around the low tables, faces of all nations, speech of all languages, and, as an undercurrent, the incessantly made gentle appeal for notice from the dark-skinned pedlars sinuously navigating the narrow channels between the chairs, with their cheap jewellery and picture post-cards and puzzle walking-sticks, trying how far they could go under the eye of the Egyptian policeman, standing ready to order them over the curb at the first sign of unwelcome pertinacity.

For a good half-hour we sat at ease, in the middle of this picture, and I enjoyed myself surpassingly. Then a little more shopping on behalf of my still unsatisfied lady companion, and then the gathering of the whole seven of our landing party at the appointed rendezvous for luncheon. We were ready for the meal, and it was not the least memorable of the æsthetic pleasures of that "Sunday out." I am told it was simply as a meal ashore, after many meals at sea, that I found it so delectable, but in justice to the courteous French proprietor, as he seemed to be, who himself took charge of our table, and for my own credit as a connoisseur, I deny that assertion, made only by those who were not there. I declare, on my honour, that, apart from the good cookery, the bread, butter and beer of the Hotel Continental at Port Said—such a seemingly unlikely place in which to find them so—were the best I ever tasted. Particularly the bread. One of the remaining ambitions of my life is to find out whether that bread was French, or Egyptian, or Turkish, or what (the reader bears in mind that this is the story of an innocent abroad), and to get some more of it, if possible.

We sat outside the house again, to repose after our repast, and I should think there was no more contented person in the world than I was then. I bought a little more Brummagem rubbish that palmed itself off as of Oriental manufacture, of the softly persistent pedlars circulating about my chair; and our escort settled the hotel bill, which worked out at four-and-sixpence for each of us. Never did I grudge hard-earned money for sensual indulgence less. I would not now take pounds for my recollections of that meal, because the day could not have been perfect without it.

So it drew on for four o'clock, when leave expired. Tired, hot and happy, we wandered back to the quay, dropped our threepenny pieces into official hands before the tantalised boatmen, stepped into our cushioned barge and were rowed to the ship. There we found coaling done, afternoon tea prepared for us, everything ready for the start. And, again in the decline of the brilliant day, we saw the whole place bathed in celestially rosy light, a last impression of the gorgeous East as one loves to imagine it, to be hung on the line of the picture gallery of memory alongside Aden and Suez. Because decks were being washed down, the captain allowed a few of us to survey the scene from his bridge, and while we rested weary bones we gazed from that commanding altitude upon the unforgettable panorama—the houses of the sea-front, the casino, the famous lighthouse, the bathing-beach with its white surf and its machines, the long breakwater walling the exit from the canal, and—farewelling us, as it seemed—the impressive statue of Ferdinand de Lesseps, pointing back to his great work. At sunset we fetched up the coats so long unworn, and in the fresh air of the Mediterranean watched the flushing and fading of the distant city, low on the water like another Venice, until the evening bugle called us down. Too tired to dress, we ate our dinner perfunctorily, took a last look at the spacious, cool-breathing night, saw the Damietta light twinkling, and went to bed early. No one so much as mentioned church.

Then came three quiet days, sunny and cool, in which the right thing to do was to lie on one's long chair and recover from excitements. Meditation was so sweet, and I was so grateful to Port Said, that I could not grumble at losing Malta, where the ship had no engagements. A far-off, faint reflection of what was supposed to be a flashlight in Valetta harbour consoled me on my way to bed one night with its suggestion that Templars really lived, and that the old cathedral and the old steep streets were still there, awaiting the future pilgrim. No more did I set foot in "foreign parts," but what I further saw of them sufficed to make each remaining day of the voyage memorable. "The Bay of Tunis," says the captain, and: "Old Carthage lies behind that hill."

We were so close to the African shore that we could see the occasional town, the lonely farm, the lonelier fort or monastery, very distinctly; and the little unfenced, unshaped patches of tillage scratched out of the wilderness, and the little roadways meandering through the gaps of the crowding rock-ranges, otherwise so savagely desolate; and the evening lights sparsely scattered along the shore, and the early morning camp-fires on the seaward declivities, so high up and isolated as to suggest the fastnesses of the pirates of bygone days. A horn of the Bay of Algiers stole out of twilight mist, and lit up its clustering lamps as we looked at it; and the following day revealed the face of Spain, frowning at her vis-à-vis, but splendid in a stormy sunset, a velvety violet mass against a flaming sky.

At four o'clock again on Sunday morning I was up and dressed, summoned by the captain stamping overhead. And out of the dawn came majestic Gibraltar—the sun was up before five—and Algeciras of recent fame, ships and warships, hills, houses, hamlets, windmills, roads and Tarifa Point transfixing a wrecked steamer, sad detail of a picture full of life and charm. Another red-letter Sunday, but not quite so red as the last. Divine service was duly celebrated in the saloon after dinner—our last on board.

The captain stamped again at five A.M. on Monday, and I saw the Castle of Cintra on its rocky headland, and more of the interesting life of the country as we slid along its shores. I cut breakfast short to feast on the historic landscape (in youth I had devoured the literature of the Cid, the Peninsular War, and Don Quixote, in a score of weighty tomes), to study the contours of Spanish houses, to count the number of visible Spanish windmills, all twirling their sails for business, in the good old Mediæval style. Until the sailors at their work of holystoning and sluicing drove us from the last inch of deck, and rain—almost the only rain we had on that blessed voyage—drew a grey curtain over the scene.

The Bay of Biscay was an angel. Summer-blue sea and sky, blushing gloriously when sunset interfused them, a young horned moon, with its attendant star, hanging over the saffron afterglow and making night heavenly; hardly a breaking wave. And the East was all behind us, and Malta and Spain, even Australia, which still held the kernel of one's heart; their memories were put away like precious pictures in their packing-cases, until presently one would have time to hang them in the light again. Nothing could be thought of now but that which we were to see to-morrow—England, the Mecca of our pilgrimage—after thirty-eight years.

It was Thursday, the 4th of June, at nine in the morning, when it happened. Of all the lovely mornings we had at sea that was the loveliest. A little hazy on the sky-line, but sunny, breezy, bracing, absolutely perfect. I ran upstairs after breakfast, to find a group of men focussing their glasses upon a distant spot. One of them turned and pointed to it. "There she is," said he. "That's Beachy Head."

There she was indeed, a white speck shining out of the melting fog. I pressed my own good glasses to my eyes, but just at first, although she was so plain to see, I was too blind to see her.

[CHAPTER II]

ABOUT TOWN

How beautiful England is! The home-stayers do not know it, nor the stranger within her gates. One must have been long enough absent from her in a sharply contrasting environment to have become an outsider, a cosmopolitan connoisseur, while still not an alien but native to her soil—at any rate, imbued with her maternal influence—to appreciate her consummate charm. I think that Australians and Americans, her elder and younger offspring, who have so many points of view in common, do so more fully than other peoples of the world, although we "swear by" the lands where we have our ampler homes and opportunities—perhaps for that very reason. It is an impression I have gained from the literature of the States, which has supplied my chief reading for many years. Whether right or wrong, I shall feel, when I fall into rhapsodies on the subject—and really I cannot help it—that my American readers will understand me before them all.

That it is not a case of the rose-coloured spectacles is proved by the fact that we no sooner set foot in the beloved Old Country than we begin to sniff at a number of her little ways—little ways that are quite all right to less impartial critics. We even feel that we could teach our grandmother something about the sucking of eggs with good warrant for reversing the orthodox procedure; only that she is our grandmother, bless her, with the natural attributes of her time of life, and we do not want her different. Were she "younged up," as a member of my household describes the old lady who dresses to conceal her age, we should not love her more, and we might respect her less. Twice as "smart," she would not be half as beautiful.

The matter stands thus: The Family of the British Empire is like other families. The children who go out into the world have, and must have, a wider grip of affairs than the parent who stops at home. They are better able, as well as willing, to keep up with the times; and, as in other families, it is the elder-sisterly leadership that the younger sister follows. Although we Australians have cherished the belief that England, in all her manifestations, sets the perfect standard for us, I see now that it is America we have copied, insensibly to ourselves, in the arts that make for the comfort and convenience and contingent elegance of everyday life. I did not know where we stood in the scale of domestic civilisation until I began to frequent the rural districts where I was born and bred, and found the situation as I had left it, and myself so grown away from it that I might have come from another planet. It is not, of course, our merit in any way but our luck that we have, in addition to our birthright in her, a land of plenty, which ensures easy circumstances, connoting a high average of culture, to her unburdened and unjostled people, and no deep-worn groove to shut us in, and shut out from our vision the movements of the world. It would be gross taste for a cadet of the family, and one so juvenile, to give itself airs in the ancestral house; but it does cause some slight annoyance now and then to be treated as one who does not know the ropes at all. That in the great journals that came into my hands of a morning in London there was rarely so much as a mention of Australia, while every little tinpot dependency of a foreign power had its trifling affairs attended to, was nothing—our own fault as much as anybody's. But when those who never look at a London journal, who hardly know even Emperor William by name, since he does not live in the parish, want to teach you to suck eggs that have been rotten for years without their knowing it—on the theory that you have had no eggs where you have been living—you do get a little tired. And if young Australia feels that way small wonder at America not liking the grandmotherly tutelage, so long after knowing herself the leader of the world. Our old darling cannot understand why one who by every tie of nature should be devoted to her flouts her authority and turns a cold shoulder to her endearments, but the other children understand.

Well, America can afford to forgive everything, and she has forgiven everything, now, while only gratitude is due from us who, remaining in the bosom of the family, are so faithfully done by and cared for. All I am trying to say is that experience teaches knowledge, that love which is not blind is the love best worth having, and that we, with that knowledge and that love, are more competent to appreciate England than she to appreciate us. She thinks we do not know what's what, because people in the dark can think anything; but when we judge her beautiful, it is with the judgment that compares and discriminates. We know what we are talking about. It may be taken that she is beautiful, and no mistake.

We had embarked for Australia in 1870 from Plymouth, having travelled to that port from London in the night. Coming back in 1908 England met me with a face I had not seen before. Beachy Head was as new to my eyes as the rock of Aden; so was Dover Castle and all that sunny coast; so was the Thames of commerce. In the perfect June weather, and with its historical suggestions, even that last bit of the way was glorified. Perhaps the critical faculty had not quite steadied down, but even between the marshes I was thinking: "How beautiful England is!" Altogether the interval between nine A.M. and seven P.M. was a culmination of the voyage worthy of all that had led up to it. By the way, we dropped anchor at Gravesend in a violent thunderstorm.

We spent one more short night on the ship. In the small hours of the morning a steward informed us that the first caller had arrived, a near relation born during our long absence, now a man over thirty, who had enterprisingly boarded us by the pilot's ladder at the locks. With this efficient courier, who spared us all landing troubles, we passed from our sea-home to a quiet hotel in a quiet square near Liverpool Street Station, whence we were to pass out to the country on the following day; a house to be affectionately remembered, for its treatment of us. There we dumped our bags and made our walking toilets, feeling already as English as could be; then started forth to celebrate the day with (naturally) a first-rate luncheon to begin with. Thereafter we proposed to "do" as much of London as we could cover by dinner-time.

We did have a first-rate luncheon, from the point of view of unfashionable persons newly off the sea. But it was right here that we began to sniff. No, not to sniff, of course, but to set the critical faculty in order. At home, we informed our relative, a meal of that quality would be just about half the price, and such trifles as vegetables, rolls, butter, tea and coffee, would be thrown in gratis. The skimpy little curl of butter, that had to be separately paid for, in place of the heaped balls to which you could freely help yourself, was a particular one amongst the pinpoint grievances that London restaurants of the middle class supplied us with. At that first meal on English soil we remembered the first we had taken in Collins Street after landing in Melbourne so long ago—our astonishment at its ample excellence and small cost; and at each subsequent entertainment in London paid for by ourselves we were tempted to make odious comparisons when there was nobody to overhear. Australia is a land of plenty to all her people, high and low, but we forget it until we go away from her. Then we know.

After luncheon my husband went off to his bankers, his tailors (whose clothes he had worn uninterruptedly for thirty-eight years, with some modification of measurements from time to time), and otherwise to poke about by himself in a London that he declared he knew every inch of, although afterwards he confessed to having been once or twice at fault; and my nephew-in-law escorted me to my once favourite draper's, where I had bought the gems of my modest bridal trousseau. Ever since that long-past day I had sworn by the famous firm as authorities on and purveyors of the absolutely correct thing in women's wear, and now thought to render myself immune to English criticism by the surest method and with no waste of time.

I was out of that shop almost as soon as I was in, and distractedly flitting through other emporiums of the West End, wishing I had completed my outfit where I began it. I should have saved money and suited myself better. In pity for my companion, patiently awaiting my pleasure on the pavements outside—dropping asleep as he stood, poor boy, for he had not seen a bed for between thirty and forty hours—I confined myself to the one indispensable purchase, and that was a compromise between what I liked and what I could get.

Not that I suggest any rivalry between our best drapery shops and these best of Oxford and Regent Streets; it would be absurd to compare them. But I certainly realised as I had never done before how good the former are. I understood why a friend of mine with whom I once went clothes-buying in Bourke Street, immediately after her return from a year in England, plumping down on a chair by a familiar counter, said, with a luxurious sigh: "What a comfort to get back to our own shops again!" She did not "know her way about" in London; nor did I. And I cannot say that, at the six months' end, I had done any better for myself there than I should have done if I had supplied all my wants at home. I found no material difference in cost, and as regards the correct thing we are quite up to date. The new fashions are passed on to us for the corresponding season, winter or summer, that they belong to in England; and there is no doubt in my mind that, taking English women in the bulk and Australian women in the bulk, the latter are the better dressed by far. It is not what I expected would be the case.

Tea—that essential feature of afternoon shoppings in Melbourne, where a tea-room is to your hand wherever you may happen to be—was the one thought in my head when I rejoined my drowsy escort, although it could not have been more than three o'clock. "Let us find a nice place," said I, craving easy-chairs as well as tea; and we found one. It had no shop to it, inviting us by a mere label on an open street door and a glimpse of inner staircase. Privacy and repose were indicated, and I unhesitatingly turned in.

It was the very thing. A pretty little drawing-room, all to ourselves, cushioned basket-chairs, tea and cakes and bread-and-butter and toasted things, all as good as I was accustomed to, although by no means so cheap (but expense was no matter on this festive day), and the courteous attendance that I must confess is not to be counted on in Australia as I learned to count upon it in England. With us officialdom is so disproportionately powerful throughout the land (nothing can be in proportion if the main base of population is inadequate) that the so-called servants of the public are virtually in the position of masters, and, knowing it, are inclined to wait upon you condescendingly, as if conferring a favour, or to be abrupt and off-hand with you, or to leave you to take your chance. It is quite natural.

So here, in this very nice little room, I revelled in my tea—the first good cup since Hobart (Adelaide was a disappointment in this respect, and at Port Said I did not ask for it)—and we rested in our comfortable chairs for the best part of an hour. Then, my escort being again wide-awake and active, and myself refreshed and fit for anything, I suggested a drive through London in any direction on the top of a motor 'bus.

That was an exciting drive. Unlike my husband, I did not know my London. Years and years and years ago I had been accustomed to pay an annual visit to my eldest aunt, who was my godmother, and then I was driven from what was Shoreditch Station to her house in Notting Hill (which she grieved was not, as it so nearly was, Kensington), and in a few weeks driven back again in a straw-carpeted four-wheeled cab, from the closed windows of which I had my only peeps at the city—a forbidden city to a well-brought-up young lady of tender years. Between whiles my diversions were confined to West End picture galleries and museums, a few West End shoppings, drives in the Park, walks to the neighbouring church. Only to the latter, and that but occasionally and in exceptional circumstances, was I ever allowed to go unattended, even after I was engaged to be married, while she was responsible for me. Darling that she was, I am not going to laugh at her for being so ridiculous, especially as I have my doubts as to whether she was ridiculous at all—whether there is not still something to be said for the clearly defined social status of children, and the careful chaperonage of growing-up girls, that were matter of course to us, young and old, in those far-distant days.

My thoughts were full of her as we drove towards our old haunts, when the absorbing fascination of the narrow, crowded streets and the marvellous interweaving of the wheeled traffic through them gave place to the enchantment of the "Park" once more, the charm beyond expression of English trees and grass, the stately roadways and perspectives of our old walking and driving quarter, so unexpectedly familiar and remembered—the only London life I had to remember—after such a gap of time and change!

The Marble Arch—oh, the Marble Arch! The new gates behind it were approaching completion; the greatly improved arrangement was pointed out to me by my courier, how the old blocking of carriages was done away with—I believe that very day inaugurated the new use. But for me there was only the old bottle-neck which had annoyed generations of carriage folk, and which had given my young girlhood one of its first woman dreams.

It will be understood that the best-beloved and most loving of maiden aunts became even as Andromeda's dragon at the approach of an unauthorised young man. The very thought of him in connection with her god-daughter made her hair rise. Well, I was driving with her one afternoon, and just within the Marble Arch we were so wedged in a block of carriages that the occupant of one—truly a most charming fellow—had to sit facing me at arm's length for quite a minute. With the best will in the world, and I believe we both tried to help it, it was impossible after some embarrassing seconds to prevent the twinkle of a smile. In spite of its ravaging effects upon me (all her fault, for I never saw him before or since), it was no more than a twinkle, behind a gravity of demeanour as gentlemanly as could be. But what could evade the lynx-eyed vigilance of the duenna of old? No sooner were we disentangled than my aunt, almost as flustered as I was, sternly demanded of me: "Did you see that?" On my confessing that I did she put up the window of our jobbed brougham and never afterwards allowed me to have it down while in the Row or other dangerous places; and I had to rub holes in the film of breath lining the glass to see anything at all. Small wonder that in my seclusion I nursed the memory of a momentary adventure with a young man until it grew to the proportion of a personal romance. In all my subsequent walks and drives with her I was thinking of him, looking for him; and as a respectable mother of a family have not forgotten the spiritual freemasonry (as it was idealised into) of his passing twinkle of a smile. How handsome he was! And how well we understood each other!

Only once did I escape out of my cage and fly at large in London. It was with a young widowed cousin, who, as a married woman, was allowed to take me out. We did not dare to report that we had eaten lunch at a railway buffet, ridden in omnibuses (a thing no gentlewoman of those days was supposed to do—she was expected to walk rather), and even trodden a pavement overlooked by club windows, when we returned to Notting Hill at nightfall. The widowed cousin, too, was one of three motherless bairns whom the aunt had brought up from infancy. However, with all the risks of reaction, it seems to many of us old stagers that it is good to have borne the yoke in our youth, and that some modification of the apparatus would be better for our children than none at all. Of course they do not agree with us, which makes it very likely that we are wrong.

Old and new met together at our journey's end—the gates of the Anglo-French Exhibition at Shepherd's Bush. The place had just been opened to the public, and was the sensation of the hour, even more interesting to my companion than to me, drowned as I was in associations of the past. The supposed object of our drive was to locate it, the beautiful imitation-alabaster city that held promise for both of us, amply redeemed in due course, of happy days to come. This accomplished, we returned to our hotel stupefied with fatigue. The two men were able to enjoy a good dinner and a fairly late sit-up talk. I tumbled straightway into a comfortable bed, and sighed and sighed, too tired to eat or speak, but as blissfully satisfied with the state of things as it was possible to be. A nice little tea-tray came to my bedside presently, and after it the kind landlady herself to see what else she could do for me, just like the thoughtful hostess who has been one's friend for years. I slept little, that first night in England, but there was every inducement to repose. The little city square was as quiet as the Bush. I could hear the soft and mellow chime of a distant clock at intervals—very far away it seemed—and that was the only sound. We had an open window, as usual, and could not understand how the heart of London could be so still.

A cheerful and quiet coffee-room welcomed us to an excellent breakfast next day. We had promised ourselves "real" Yarmouth bloaters (one of a few long-cherished gastronomical dreams brought over with other luggage); the maid apologised for giving us broiled mackerel instead, but that was memorably delicious. I cannot help mentioning it. I may as well mention also, while I am about it, that the plentiful Australian table is not to be compared with the English in the matter of fish and game.

Breakfast over, our courier was set free to roam the White City at Shepherd's Bush until tea-time, and my husband and I set forth on an aimless ramble together, merely to see London and amuse ourselves, all business barred. What a time we had! More drives on motor 'buses; more English delicacies for our voracious appetites at luncheon (sausages, which G. had always declared they did not know how to make in Australia); St Paul's, inside and out; lovely Staples Inn, which I could hardly tear myself away from; and the commoner lions of the city, such as the Mansion House and the Bank—all new to me. I felt quite an old Londoner by four o'clock, when it was time to reunite our party, get a cup of tea, and start on our journey to Cambridgeshire.

Only a few days later I discovered another London I had not known. I returned to spend a week with a many-years-old friend, a personage of distinction, even to her royal kinsfolk, but never other than the dearest of the dear. Instead of riding motor 'buses I sat behind ducal liveries. In the way of entertainment privileges were accorded me that no money could buy. It was the brilliant episode of my trip, and that, to my regret (as the author), is all I can say about it in this book. What a pity that considerations of taste and decorum should compel the autobiographer, as considerations of imperial policy compel the Russian press censor, to "black out" the very bits that would be most interesting to read. If one could throw delicate scruples to the winds and tell the whole story of any human life, or portion of life, however small, the long reign of the work of fiction would be over.

June was still less than a fortnight old when this happy week began—with a satisfying drive from Liverpool Street Station to the heart of Belgravia in a hansom all to myself—just when I preferred no company. A drive, I must add, as cheap as it was delightful. Half-a-crown! It was hard to believe the driver serious. I could not have done the distance in a Melbourne hansom under half-a-sovereign. According to my prevailing luck the weather was perfect, and every inch of the way for me was packed with interest. The Thames Embankment was a-making when I left in 1870; now I saw it and its stately precincts in their modern character. And, in addition to the features of what was but background to London life, I saw a great procession of the Protesting Women, coming upon it in the very nick of time, as if I had planned to do so. I passed its whole length, seemingly of miles, from end to end, sometimes at a foot's pace, sometimes blocked for several minutes at a time, the ordinary traffic having but half the road; and I rejoiced in my slow progress and was profoundly impressed with the spectacle. Not having heard about it beforehand I was puzzled to account for the immense lines of carriages filled with women—many of the carriages very smart, and a number of the women in academic dress, wearing the hoods of their degrees—massed in Whitehall and thereabouts; but the significance of the demonstration was soon made evident—before the army on foot, with its multitudinous banners came upon the scene, led by the aged and honoured ladies who had been fighting the same battle half-a-century ago.

In view of all I have since heard and read of the antics of what the newspapers call the militant suffragettes, I am glad I had this opportunity to gauge the strength and seriousness of the movement behind them, which—unless their actions are grossly misreported—they pitifully misrepresent. So long as my eye was on it, at any rate, the march of the countless women was as dignified as anything I ever saw; nor could a funeral procession have been treated by the bystanders with more respect. That was the most striking thing about it. The half-width of the street, congested with the traffic of the whole, blocked to a standstill every few yards, neither murmured nor jeered—not by a single voice that I could hear. While here and there a man stood to give dumb homage, his hat in his hand.

But, oh, what a Mediæval sort of business it all seemed! To be struggling so long, and with such pain and passion, for mere liberty—in our England of all places—at this time of day! How strange to one long outside the groove, the limitation of vision of those within! If it were permissible to teach our grandmother to suck eggs, we could tell her that the tremendous controversy is but a mountain labouring of mouse. In our young country overseas "votes for women" were given to us as naturally as they give licences to respectable lady innkeepers; after due discussion in parliament, of course, and some "say" at public meetings of the party chiefly concerned, but with no vulgar altercation or unseemly fuss of any kind. And we quietly go forth to the nearest polling-place on (the very infrequent) election mornings, being supposed to have glanced at the family newspaper from day to day, and come back to our domestic avocations (most of us like to get the small job over as soon as possible after breakfast); and the world goes on with no sign of damage. Not being necessarily the adversaries of man, because not unjustly suffering from his rule, and having had no devil of vindictiveness put into us we do not interfere with him in Parliament or on the Bench, or attempt to upset his dignity in any way. We have public work enough managing the hospitals, and such things, where we have the free hand to save him a world of trouble. Though, if a woman should turn up in a legislative assembly some fine day—and it might be any day—I really do not think the skies would fall. My belief is that the men would get used to it in a week and reconciled in a month. Not that I would be that woman for anything you could give me. The main thing is that politically we are good friends and not sore-hearted antagonists. As fairly as our men have dealt by us shall we deal by them. Dear, dear! To think what a buttress Ireland might have been to England now if she had been let out of leading-strings three generations ago!

I returned to London at intervals between this sweet June day, when the rhododendrons in the Park were still abloom and the "Season" at its culmination, and the early winter evening of my last departure; but without those passages which must be "blacked out" the tale is but a tale of prosaic shoppings and the sort of country-cousin sightseeings at which the superior person lifts the nose of scorn. Even in the latter regard, I did not see half the things I had meant to see. The Royal Academy Exhibition was postponed and postponed until too late. The British Museum, the National Gallery, Westminster Abbey—even these I missed. The Tower, which I had never seen at all, that I can remember, I now saw only from the outside—except on the stage at Drury Lane, in the Marriages of Mayfair. The friend and hostess who took me to this play, as the wife of a Colonel of Grenadiers and intimately acquainted with the life of the place, answered for the accuracy of detail in the dramatic representation of it; furthermore, she arranged that I was to explore the great fortress in her company, and took my promise to accept no other guide. I was then within a fortnight of leaving England, and, to my keen regret, the press of last engagements crowded that one out.

Mention of the Tower reminds me of a circumstance that occurred the night before we made the futile compact, than which circumstance nothing happening to me in London impressed me more.

An afternoon at His Majesty's to see Beerbohm Tree in Faust—the new Faust, redeemed, not destroyed, through his human errors; the new Mephistopheles, with the dignity of a god—had provided excitement enough for one day, and we decided to spend the evening quietly at home. Tea, a rest with a book, three only at dinner, were the peaceful preliminaries; then we sank into deep sofa-corners by the drawing-room fire.

"This," said B., "is the opportunity I have been looking for to show you something. They have only just come back from the British Museum."

Two large, thick volumes were produced. And when I opened one of them—the other was a typed rendering of the precious text—I perceived that I was privileged for the moment above the rest of my countrymen. For I was the first of the general public to read some most interesting pages of English history, lost long before the story as we know it was put together for the use of schools.

For three hundred years or more they had probably been in hiding where they had recently been found—in the library of one of the seats of the family to which B. belonged. Consequent upon the death of the owner, her brother-in-law, there had been rummaging about the house, and a quantity of valuable documents had been discovered behind oaken wainscots and elsewhere. A cupboardful, found at a moment when it was not convenient to remove them, mysteriously disappeared, unread, before they could be retrieved; the bundle of letters on my knee had been spared to the family, of which a Lord C., of Charles the Second's reign, had been friend and kin to the writers. B. and the British Museum had been attending to their preservation. They had been carefully arranged and bound, and their condition was so perfect, and the penmanship was so exquisite, that I was able to read the original, in the old lettering of the time, as fast as B. could follow me with the modernised typed copy. We took turn and turn about with this reading and checking, and I suppose it took us hours—we were too absorbed to think of time—to get through the whole, if we did get through it.

They were the letters of that Lord William Russell who was beheaded, and of his wife, the famous Rachel, written during his trial and imprisonment, to and of each other, to Charles the Second, and the King's replies; portions of her journals; a long and minutely detailed account of the whole tragedy, from day to day, almost from hour to hour, by Bishop Burnet, who attended the prisoner—all in their own handwritings; and a more touching and elevating tale and a more distinguished piece of literature I do not remember to have come across. B. showed me a letter from the lady who had typewritten the copy. She said in effect that her sense of the privilege conferred on her with the work was beyond words. By this time, possibly, Lady C. has allowed the documents, family archives though they be, to be published for the benefit of the nation. Unless, indeed, the nation has had them this long time, and I have not known it.

Beheadings, again, remind me of Madame Tussaud's. As a child I had thought it hard lines never to see the famous waxworks, and I never did—until this belated return to where they were. I might not then have done so but for the accident of a Baker Street engagement, which being discharged with unexpected promptitude left us, G. and I, with an hour or two on our hands. The great building, new since he had visited it, stood almost over us, conspicuously proclaiming itself, and with one accord we turned into it. Another lifelong ambition gratified at last!

"You won't go into the Chamber of Horrors, I suppose?" said G., when I had viewed Mrs Pankhurst and the rest of the notabilities.

"Oh yes," said I, for I was out to see things. And down I went. It was not particularly thrilling to one whose childhood was so far behind, but it was very nasty. A cup of tea in the fresh air of the restaurant was grateful after it. And I felt a particular craving for a bath.

One thing, however, has contrived to haunt me—the mask of Marie Antoinette as at the moment after execution, with the blood-oozing nostrils and the swooning, drowning eyes. For it seemed to me as if that might be very much how she would have looked.

But it strikes me I am not developing the proposition set at the beginning of this chapter to be the text of my discourse.

[CHAPTER III]

IN BEAUTIFUL ENGLAND

The second evening ashore saw us speeding out of London towards Cambridge and Ely, and beyond to the not-to-be-mentioned spot in the fens which represented the bosom of the family—G.'s family, that is to say, for England held no more trace of mine.

I saw prettier English landscapes afterwards, from the windows of railway carriages, but this first picture of the green country was overwhelmingly beautiful to my eyes. I had forgotten what the country grass was like, and the country trees. Our "English trees" of boulevard and garden had not struck me as inferior to their ancestors in any way, but here, in these glorious free-flung masses, how different they were. Throughout my stay and various ramblings in the land, the trees and the grass were my constant joy. The lawns of English gardens—not bits and scraps that must not be trodden on, but acres of velvet-soft emerald carpet always under one's feet, making the loveliest setting for flowers and tea-parties. It happened in this lucky year that the summer was the finest the land had known for years, and I think I must have had my tea on grass more times in that short English season than in all the years of my sojourn in the brighter country of the South; if I except Bush picnics—and I need not except them, because the aim of Bush campers is to keep as clear of grass as possible. I am not ashamed to say that I could have wept for joy of those English trees and meadows when I first saw them after the long, long exile. Nothing but the publicity of my position prevented it. I could only look and look at them till throat and eyes ached. I could not talk.

The unspeakable memories that thronged the platform at Cambridge! The last moment of one of the most tragical happenings of my life passed me, probably, on the very spot where our train halted. At a later day the ghosts of all the hours belonging to that last moment forgathered with me in the old quadrangles, and I could not believe they had been there for forty years. The first glimpse of the towers of Ely was still more thrilling. That ever I should have lived to see them again! Here, when soon afterwards we prowled about the place—the first I saw of an English provincial town after my return—I found my eye hopelessly out of focus. I ought to have known it better than any spot in the country. I had lived there and married there, and it had been my last English home; yet, but for the cathedral, I should not have recognised it. "This Ely!" I exclaimed. "These little, little, quaint, cramped streets and houses!" I seemed to have seen them in a picture; they were incredible as the whole substance of our city of old. Gradually I got the perspective, but it took two or three visits to do it. The familiar past enmeshed me with its thousand tentacles. "You don't know me, ma'am?" a weather-beaten matron emotionally accosted me on the steps of the post-office—her married daughter drove the cart she hastily descended from on seeing me. "You don't remember me? I was housemaid at W—— when you were there on your honeymoon." One of the young maids, with white satin ribbon in their caps, who stood with their smiling welcomes on the doorstep of the rectory at W—— when our bridal brougham drove up in 1870! The tears jumped to my own eyes as I wrung her toil-worn hands. I nearly kissed her in the open street—and market day too! Old servants, old friends, stretched arms to draw me into the groove they had never left—never been thrown out of, as I was—until the gulf of years sank out of sight, and we fraternised again as if partings had never been. Yet I could not get the "atmosphere," so to speak. I am such a fresh-air person! The first time I attended service at the cathedral where I was such a devout worshipper in my youth, although it was a Pan-Anglican function, with a stirring American preacher to it, and my personal interest in the occasion, apart from that, was intense, I was so overcome with drowsiness that I had to struggle the whole time not to disgrace myself before the bishops, under whose eyes I sat. I could easily attribute it to the fatiguing excitements of the first days in England, but that was no reason why at each subsequent service at the same place the same phenomenon should occur. As surely as I went to church at the cathedral, I got deadly sleepy straight away, and had to fight to keep eyes snapping and head from rolling off. Suddenly I suspected what the trouble was. I looked up at the roofs, into the lantern, around the windows—there was not a crack for ventilation above the doorways, never had been in the hundreds of years that pious breathings had daily been going up. When I mentioned the matter to my old friends, who had been going to the cathedral all the time I had been away, they were rather inclined to be annoyed. They found nothing wrong with the air of the cathedral. Of course not. Nor did I in the old days. It was typical of the sea-change my whole being had undergone.

Well, after that sight of Ely—and a glorious pile it is, from just that point of view that the London train gives you as it draws near to the station—after Ely, fen of the fens, that was drowned morass not so very long ago, now richly cropped, the farms and hamlets standing clear like things set on a table; then the station in the fields, the little governess-cart at the gate, the unknown niece at the pony's head; the short cut across country, and the old farmhouse, a long grey streak on a wide green sea, with one bright and beautiful splash of colour lighting up the sober landscape—the flaming orange of an Austrian briar bush in full bloom on the front lawn. Finally, the bosom of the family, over which the veil of reticence must fall.

On the following evening—no, the evening after that—I had the long-dreamed-of bliss of a ramble through English lanes. Although it was fen country, there were lanes about the farm—green old trees interlacing overhead, green grass thick as a silk rug underfoot, all the precious things that used to be in tangled hedge and ditch. I gathered them, and sniffed them, and cherished them; no words can describe the ecstasy of the meeting with them again—pink herb-robert in its brown calyx, the darling little blue speedwell—"birdseye," as we called it; white cow-parsnip, wild roses (following the may, which had just passed), buttercups and oxeye daisies and yellow birdsfoot trefoil, and all the rest of them; their scents, even more than their sweet forms, overpowering in suggestion of the days that were no more. The nightingale, to my disappointment, was gone, but the lark and the cuckoo were rarely silent. A dear brown-velvet "bumble"-bee showed me his golden stripe again. Nesting partridges whirred up from the hedgerows in their sudden way and went flickering over the fields—dewy English fields, exhaling the breath of clover and beanflower, the incomparable perfume of English earth....

But Norfolk is my county. And not thirty-eight years, but nearly half-a-century, had passed since I was within its borders, when I crossed them again about a month after our return. A still longer interval had elapsed between my departure from the first home that I remember and my seeing it again—and recognising it in the selfsame moment.

A Cambridgeshire sister-in-law had been led by various accidental happenings to rent a house right in the middle of my territory, unaware that I was not as great a stranger to Norfolk as herself. The haunts of my childhood lay around her in all directions and close up to her doors, and never, never had I expected to revisit them, except in dreams. G. can hardly be dragged by an ox chain where he does not want to go, and he did not want to go to D——, which had no associations for him, even to see his sister. "Why couldn't she have settled in some decent place?" he wanted to know, when her affectionate calls to him to come and be entertained evoked the spectre of boredom which never in any circumstances appeared to me. The pretty town of her adoption was, from his point of view, a "hole," with "nothing in it." But my luck was in when she drifted thither. It was the first court of the sanctuary, so to speak; the way by which I entered the hallowed places of the past. Every inch of the old streets, every brick and chimney-pot over fifty years old, was sacred to me. The bulk of life lay between that past and now, and the intervening years dropped away as if they had never been.

Over the road from my bedroom window in her house stood a fine old dwelling, with a sundial on a prominent gable, and a high-walled garden of which I caught beautiful glimpses through the tall iron gates and between the ancient trees—quite unchanged. There, when I was a child, Miss M. kept her Preparatory School for Young Gentlemen, still mentioned with pride in the local handbooks, although long extinct. "Many of her old pupils have attained high positions in the world," say they; and I wonder if these were any of the little men with whom we little women of eight or nine or thereabouts exchanged furtive glances over the pew-tops in the old parish church on Sundays. I can see some of their faces now, and hers, so serene and lofty, as she stood amongst them, her ringlets showering down out of her bonnet like two bunches of laburnum, a narrow silken scarf about her well-boned bust. Young Nelsons of the great admiral's family were amongst Miss M.'s "young gentlemen"; the hero himself was at school in D——, although his schoolhouse is no more; and the cocked hat, with two bullet holes through it, in which he fought the Battle of the Nile, has belonged to the neighbourhood since before Trafalgar. "Well, Beechey, I'm off after the French again. What shall I leave my godson?" The hat was asked for, and, says Nelson, "He shall have it," and the granddaughter of the honoured infant has it still. It takes a Norfolk person to appreciate the importance of these historic associations to a little Norfolk town.

On the Denes at Yarmouth there is a tall column, something like one hundred and fifty feet high, with Britannia ruling the waves from the apex, that in my time stood majestically alone between river and sea, and part of its dedicatory inscription, which is in Latin, runs thus:

HORATIO LORD NELSON

Whom, as her first and proudest champion in naval fight, Britain honoured, while living, with her favour, and, when lost, with her tears; Of whom, signalised by his triumphs in all lands, the whole earth stood in awe on account of the tempered firmness of his counsels, and the undaunted ardour of his courage; This great man NORFOLK boasts her own, not only as born there of a respectable family, and as there having received his early education, but her own also in talents manners and mind.

This will show how little D——, which assisted at his early education, deserves to be called a "hole, with nothing in it."

Miss M. died or retired in time to leave another set of memories for me around that old house. I laughed to myself as I looked at the gate through which a most dashing, black-whiskered gentleman of the D'Orsay type used to issue of a Sunday morning, gloved in primrose kid, crowned with glossiest beaver, the glass of fashion to his sex and the admiration of ours, and thought of his little secret which I daresay he never knew had been surprised.

His pew in the old church (all open benches now) was close to ours, and we little girls used to watch him as he entered and stood, turned to the wall, with his hat before his face, to say his preliminary prayer. Something aroused our suspicions, and a burning desire to see the lining of that hat. Patience and perseverance rewarded us with a peep, and there was a little round mirror fixed to the inside of the crown.

And then I sighed, remembering his sister—I think it was his sister—a rather swarthy, dark-browed, Juno-like creature, as I recall her; knowing that I had just been within a touch of meeting her again; an old old woman....

Once, in the far past, at the first known home, some miles from D——, we gave a dance. You remember those dances of the fifties, dear reader who went to them? They were simple affairs; no caterer from outside the house, no outlay for flowers or band or champagne, or the hire of public rooms (except for county or hunt balls, and then the claim was light on the individual pocket). But if they were not as delightful to go to as the more expensive corresponding functions of these days, I have no memory worth trusting. I am sure you will say the same.

The guests were dancing by eight o'clock to the strains of the domestic piano, the polka and the schottische and the varsoviana alternating with quadrilles and lancers, the waltz a stately gyration round and round. They were not staled and blasé, those simple people, but as fresh as children for the game in hand. They had time to play it then. Whole love stories were enacted in a night, and there was one in which I played a part which I was too young to appreciate at the time, and of which that handsome girl of the house opposite was the heroine. In my ringlets and sandalled shoes, my full-skirted book-muslin frock and blue sash and shoulder-knots—a little spoiled child allowed to see the fun for an hour or two when she ought to have been in bed—I was passed from knee to knee, petted to my heart's content by the adult guests, the gentlemen especially; and the festive scene is as clear before me now as it was then. The drawing-room was festooned with wreaths of evergreen and paper flowers, out of which branched candles in hidden sconces made of tin; the nursery guard was before the fire; the mirror with the gilt eagle on the top reflected moving figures that had space to swim in the mazy dance without jostling each other.

"Do you see that lady in the white dress?" a whiskered nurse of mine whispered in my ear.

I did—I see her now—her dark eyes flashing, dark cheek glowing, deep breast visibly swelling with the triumph of the hour—the undoubted belle of the ball. Her dress was of white tulle, flounced to the waist and trimmed with a long spray, running obliquely from neck to hem, of white artificial roses sprinkled with glass dewdrops. A cluster of the same was set in her abundant dusky hair.

"I want you to take something to her," said he, fumbling. "Don't show it to anybody, and don't give it to anybody but her."

He closed my little fist over a wad of folded paper, and I dodged through the crowd and delivered it, and returned to report.

"Did she read it?"

"Yes."

"Did she say anything?"

"No."

"Didn't she take any notice at all?"

"She only laughed."

He fell into sombre reverie, and I left him for more cheerful companionship.

Later in the evening I was in the vicinity of the belle of the ball, and she beckoned me, stooped, and whispered. "Take this to Mr G. Don't let anyone see it. Give it to him when nobody is looking."

I brought him the note, and straightway he forgot me and my services. The next I saw of him he was sitting in her pocket under the stairs.

And she did not marry him, after all! And now she is an old, old woman!

There was another member of the family (a cousin of these two), whose portrait in my mental picture gallery has been classed always as a gem of romantic art.

I only saw her once, and that was after another ball given at the same old country house where the lady of the tulle dress and dew-sprinkled roses disported herself with Mr G. I do not think I could have attended this ball myself, for I have no recollection of seeing the girl I refer to, who was there, until the following day. Her chaperon, whoever it was, had left her over in my mother's care, probably to get thoroughly rested before taking the journey home. In the morning we only heard of her. She was in bed, being assiduously coddled. Before she came forth mother gathered her little ones together and thus admonished them:

"Yes, you will see her at dinner, and if you are very good you may take her for a walk with you this afternoon. But, mind, you must be very gentle with her. You must take the greatest care of her, because she is in a decline and very soon she is going to die." We were further commanded on no account to disclose our knowledge of her sad fate to the invalid.

She come down to the midday farmhouse dinner, and it was then I took my indelible picture of her. She was probably eighteen, a willowy slip of a girl, and with the pathos of her doom about her, the loveliest creature my eyes (with such an idealising quality in them) had ever seen. That was the impression, made permanent. Very fair of skin, with golden hair arranged Madonna-wise in smooth bands; and dressed all in white, looking the part my mother had given her to perfection—an angel at large, granted to gross mortals for a little while to be jealously recalled to her proper place. Her white muslin bodice was long-waisted and stiffly-boned, and cut to a deep point in front over the bunchy skirt; but it was lovely. And the gold watch at her side, and the long gold chain round her neck to which it was attached, gave just the touch of radiance to the unearthly purity of her appearance, as effective as a Fra Angelico halo.

We took her for a walk through our fields and lanes, and with awe and reverence laid ourselves out to take care of her. I remember that we gathered mushrooms and that she ate some raw, which was unwise of her in her delicate condition. I also remember (only it spoils the picture to include such a squalid detail) that some of the little party ate more than she did, and that one was deadly sick and had to be carried home. At that point she fades from the scene—went away to die, as I supposed. This one tragic vision of her made such an impression upon my imagination that I have thought of her when anything reminded me, for over half-a-century; but I have never thought of her as being other than half angel in heaven and half dust of the earth all the time. I thought of her when I looked out of my window in my sister-in-law's house at the old house opposite, when first I returned to D——, still with an ache of pity for a young life defrauded of the common heritage, which we others, not more deserving, had come into.

But almost immediately afterwards my hostess asked me to go with her to call upon one of her new acquaintances, a lady who had known me as a child, had heard of my coming, and wished to see me. She bore the name of the family which had followed Miss M. at the house with the sundial on the wall, but as she was a widow that was the name of her husband's family, and so I had no clue to her.

We found her in the pretty garden of her handsome house close by, and she welcomed me warmly.

"You remember me?" she queried, when I had taken a basket chair beside her. "I once stayed at your house at T——. I went to a party your mother gave, and remained overnight. Don't you remember?"

I said I did, because I knew as soon as I looked at her that I had seen her before. The forehead and the set of the eyes came back to me from the past, unmistakably familiar. But the whole time I was there, although she kept talking of the old times and the old people, I was cudgelling my brains to place her and I could not. She told me she had married her cousin and had not changed her name, so that I knew where she belonged; and yet I could not think of any member of the family answering to her personal reminiscences. She took me round her garden, she showed me the rooms she lived in, spoke of her life with her husband, recently dead, but with her long enough for them to celebrate their golden wedding together; and yet I could not get myself on to the right track. I went home with my sister-in-law quite worried and bothered about it, and lay awake at night to continue my search in the holes and corners of Memory when the public, so to speak, had left the building.

Suddenly I discovered her. The face of the deaf old lady of over seventy, and the angular body that had to lean on an arm or a stick when it walked abroad, were suddenly transfigured like Faust in the play, and there hung before my eyes in the dark the beautiful vision of that golden-haired girl in white whom we had been told to take care of and be good to because she was to die soon. There was no doubt about it. That forehead and those eyes, that I had instantly recognised, although I could not identify them, were hers. She had not been dust of the earth for half-a-century, but alive all the time—yes, and well and happy; and now she was in the most comfortable circumstances and apparently far from her journey's ending still. It was a delightful discovery. Quite an appreciable sorrow seemed to have been lifted from my heart.

Unfortunately I had no opportunity to see her again, to talk with her of the old times now that I should know what I was talking about. When you have but six months in England in which to make up the arrears of about three-quarters of a lifetime, every visit is a flying visit, every taste of the old friendships but a tantalising sip.

Down the road from the walled garden of the house I have been speaking of, another high wall with a door at one end and a carriage gate at the other, the spreading crown of a great chestnut-tree overtopping the middle, bounded the street side of another garden, and sheltered from public view another house which cried to me with a thousand tongues of memory every time I passed it on my way to and from the railway station. It was one of my own old homes—the third, not counting my birthplace (which I left as a baby, and therefore have no knowledge of). The tenant of this house in D—— was now my sister-in-law's landlord, and I could have gone through it if there had been time for a polite process of siege; but because an Englishman's house is his castle, and you cannot march into it without notice as if it was yours, I was able to see only the outside of any of my old homes. Perhaps it was as well.

When no one was looking I lingered by the carriage gate, through which all the front of the house was visible—the pillared porch and flight of steps within it, the windows of the rooms where we lived when we were a family of seven or eight, and not of two as we are now; and behind them I could see with the eyes of imagination all I wanted to know.

The garden had been rearranged. There were greenhouses in it that used not to be, and the stone lions were gone. In my time two large heraldic lions, that came from the piers of a park entrance to an estate that had been brought to the hammer, sat on square pedestals in front of the house, ornaments of a semicircular lawn that now spread over ground once cut off for strawberry beds and espalier apple-trees. Under the belly of one of those lions, whose forepaws served for doorway and his haunches for shelter from wind and rain, I had my summer reading place. There I wept over the death of the Heir of Redclyffe, and shivered at the ghastly imaginings of Edgar Allan Poe. There also I made the little secret scribblings that were to lead eventually to the writing of this book. I could not see round to the arbour under the big chestnut-tree—or where the arbour was—with its processioning groups of ghosts; nor the thickets of syringa bushes, the scent of which has never come to my nose without the suggestion of this place to my mind, and never will. The nose is as sensitive to poetic impressions as the eye with its rose-coloured spectacles, if not more so. There is a poem of W.W. Story's which begins:

"O faint, delicious, spring-time violet!
Thine odour, like a key,
Turns noiselessly in memory's wards to let
A thought of sorrow free.
The breath of distant fields upon my brow
Blows through that open door ..."

And just so it is, and was, with me. Every exhalation of English earth was a magic potion to conjure visions and dreams. It did not need to be a perfume for the handkerchief, syringa or violet, jasmine or lily-of-the-valley; the smell of the little herb-robert, whose other name is something with "stink" in it, was to me—who had not smelt it for forty years—the most exquisite of all.

But the shrubbery walk around the fruit garden where the syringas grew was all open border now, not shady and secluded as when I used to pace it in dusk and dark with the earliest of those fairy emissaries that come to a girl when she is passing into her teens.... For the peculiar charm of this garden is that it was the scene of the great transition.

Here I received my first proposal. Heavens! what a shock it gave me. In fact I was horrified and terrified out of my wits. It came in a letter surreptitiously conveyed to me through servants. "I love you with my whole heart. Dare I hope that I am loved in return?"—the startling words were but the commencement of a long outpouring, but I was so frightened by them that I dared not read another. In frantic haste I destroyed the letter, and thereafter went in fear and dread of the writer—quite a grown man to me, perhaps eighteen—as of an ogre waiting to devour me. I may point out, by the way, that it is a mistake not to read letters through—one that I did not make again. This unread letter contained a request that I would, if I favoured my lover's suit, indicate the same to him by a certain sign that he alone would understand, and in my ignorance I made that sign, placing myself where he could find me, when all my aim was to get as far away from him as possible. How I hated him for his attentions no words can tell. On the other hand I rather "cottoned" to a brother of his, who did not write me love-letters. For little girls do cotton to little boys, and vice versa, and why not? "I confess I get consolation ... in seeing the artless little girls walking after the boys to whom they incline ... this is as it should be," said Thackeray, writing of children's parties. But the boy to whom I was secretly inclined was never aware of the compliment paid him, and, almost before I was aware of it myself, he was sadly removed from my path by an accidental gun-shot. And the boy who inclined, much more than inclined, to me I took every precaution that was in my power never to speak to again. I cannot remember that I ever did so.

But the reader who knows anything at all of human nature does not need to be told that when I found myself in D—— again, after an interval of nearly half-a-century, my inclination was rather to see him than to avoid him. It would be a piquant moment, I felt, that of meeting now, if his memory of early happenings was as good in old age as mine; even although no reference to them should be permitted. I quite looked forward to it.

But it was not to be. Although I had nothing to be ashamed of in connection with him—very much to the contrary—I did not mention his name to anybody, also I need not say that I kept to myself the little affair that had been between us; I merely held an ear cocked for casual information. And it ended with my leaving D—— without having any news of him, not knowing even whether he was alive or dead.

But later I dropped across one of his sisters, a widow, who had become connected by marriage with my husband's family. One day we went in a little party to the town where she lived and she entertained us to tea. I sat beside her at table, and inevitably we gossiped of our young days throughout the meal. She told me what had become of her several brothers and sisters, and so as last I heard of the one in whom I was interested.

"I have just had a letter from him," said she, no trace in her face or voice of any knowledge of the ancient secret. "I told him that you were in England, and he wishes me to give you his kindest remembrances and to say he is very sorry not to be able to see you." I forget where she said he lived, but it was in some far-away county; married, of course, with grown-up children—no doubt grandchildren—as I have.

[CHAPTER IV]

THE HOME OF CHILDHOOD

There was another old home—an earlier one—that on my first walk in D—— I went to look at. Its associations were even more keenly dear, and archæologically it was immensely the most interesting.

I was astonished to see how very, very old it was, and for the first time was curious about its evidently extensive history. There was a monastic suggestion in its thick walls and crow-stepped gables, and the oaken door exactly like a church door, and the peculiar irregularity of the grouping of its parts. Nothing was changed, except that a horrid little office had been built into a corner that was once a sunless well between masonry, containing only evergreen shrubs and a dense mat of lilies-of-the-valley; but the office was an excrescence so glaringly alone by itself that one could treat it as if it were a tradesman's cart awaiting orders. Nothing else seemed to have been altered; even the bay-tree, from which we gathered leaves to flavour cookings, stood in the little front court as of yore, and the old ivy was, I am sure, the old ivy of fifty, possibly a hundred, if not a thousand, years ago. I viewed the place now with instructed eyes, which told me that half-a-century was a mere fraction of its age.

The guide-book says nothing about it. Old dwelling-houses are too thick on the ground in England to have any distinction unconnected with famous persons and events; this was no more to the town of D—— in 1908 than it was to us when we left it for the modern four-square house with the pillared portico and stone lions on the lawn, down there near the station. At neither time was there a doubt of the latter's incomparable superiority.

But I had come from the land of the raw and new, the domain of the social vagrant and the speculative builder, and I could appreciate the charm of this relic of antiquity, for the first time. I stood at the gate, and tried to think how it had come there. The clue was in the name of the lane beside it—Priory Road—and in the guide-book statement that the fine old rectory, in the gardens of which we used to lose arrows and balls over the wall dividing it from ours, stood "on the site of a Benedictine Priory."

Then I tried to reconstruct the plan of the interior, and remembered that the floor under the cocoanut matting of the dining-room was of cold stone slabs; the passages the same, and I think there was a press of black wood, that became store cupboards, built into an end of that room. Entering the arched front door, of such pronounced ecclesiastical design, mother's store-room was the first thing you came to, a room that opened out of the front hall on your right hand. Passing through that hall and opening the door that faced you, you were dropped straight into the drawing-room down a short flight of steps. One window of that apartment looked out towards the road (I fancy the excrescent office blocked it); another, and a door, opened directly upon the garden, gravelled nearly all over, with, at one side, a group of large and very old yew-trees, roofing a circular wooden bench. In the right-hand drawing-room wall a third door opened, at the top of another flight of steps, into what we called the music-room—really a cosier sitting-room, incidentally enclosing the piano, and without so many draughts in it; and a fourth door in a fourth wall led you into the stone-flagged passage connecting with our refectory and the domestic offices, and to the foot of the staircase. Surely that plan was never drawn with a view to the convenience of a lay family!

Upstairs the arrangement was still more unconventional, although it may have been conventual, for aught I know. That window over the arched main entrance—it was open, and its muslin curtains fluttering in the breeze—belonged to one of three rooms so tucked into the many-cornered structure that they described a sort of triangle; one was hemmed in by two, the only way in and out being through one or other of those two, which also intercommunicated, the point of common junction being a sort of square entry place, having the three doors in its panelled sides. For some reason the inmost, which was also to the person in the road the outermost, room was reserved as a guest chamber—the aunts used it; but once it was given to a male visitor, who wanted to be out early. His dilemma was a cruel one, seeing that his window was in a sheer wall and he had no rope ladder. He could gain freedom only through my parents' room or through that occupied by their daughters, now grown from babies to little girls. After long listening in our joint vestibule, he chose the former path, as the least of two evils; but, although he crept on stockinged feet, my mother was awake. She made some alterations after that. It seems to me they should have been made before.

Over that window above the front door another and smaller window looked down on me. I met its gaze with a shrinking eye and the cold creeps down my back—yes, even after all those years and years! You reached the little sloping walled room behind it through a suite of attics at the top of dark and lonely stairs; the first room was the servants', who, however, were not there when I went to bed; the next had only ghosts in it, and the locked door of a lumber-room out of which I nightly expected some shape of horror to spring forth on me as I breathlessly scurried past; the last—with this window in it—was where I slept with my governess.

Seven governesses in succession reigned over us, for in my circle it was considered rather shocking to send girls to boarding-school, which was quite the proper place for boys; and I can truthfully affirm that I never learned anything which would now be considered worth learning until I had done with them all and started foraging for myself. I did have a few months of boarding-school at the end—obtained by hard teasing for it—and a very good school for its day it was, but it left no lasting impression on my mind, except that of great unhappiness. The unhappiness had nothing to do with its being a boarding-school, but solely to its not being Home. Home is a place that I never do get away from without immediately wishing myself back in it.

Of the first two governesses—technically the nursery governesses—I remember little but their names and the circumstance that one of them was a nobleman's grand-daughter. Her mother had eloped with a poor tutor, and been cast out of her world in consequence—so closely does one generation resemble another in some of its practices, if not in all. The next—I think the next—was she who once turned that gable room into a torture-chamber, worthy successor of heretic-persecuting Mediæval monks, if any such preceded her. Only I was not a heretic, but an innocent, fairly well-behaved, carefully cherished child.

She came from L——, a neighbouring town of county importance, and it was darkly hinted that her father kept a boot-shop there. Anyway, she gave herself great airs. Before coming to us she had been governess at S—— Hall, and her late pupil, Rosamond U——, was thrown in our faces all day long. If they were not so well known, I would like to write the omitted names in full, and express to Rosamond U——, if she be living, the sympathy I have since felt for her in that long-past experience common to us both; but at the time I loathed her beyond everybody, with the solitary exception of our joint governess. Rosamond was so beautiful, so good, such a perfect lady!—the continual foil to her successors. Miss H—— sniffed behind backs at everything in our house, because it was so different from what she had been accustomed to. I slept in her room—alas!—and when she was beautifying herself for the evening and father called for her at the foot of the stairs, she used to inform me, with that ugly smile of hers, that at S—— Hall Mr U—— always came upstairs to her door and escorted her to the drawing-room on his arm—he was such a perfect gentleman! She must have been a liar, than which one is accustomed to believe there is nothing worse; but she was worse—a vile woman all through. I have never in my life disclosed the horrors of the nights I spent with her; her threats of revenge, if I should do so, sealed my lips at the time, and my mortal terror of her, even after she was gone, for years more; and then I was ashamed to speak. My poor parents died ignorant of what they had exposed me to in my tender childhood. I, so extravagantly beloved and cared for! Possibly Rosamond U——'s rank saved her from the like treatment. When I think of Miss H——, and I hate to think of her—even now she could taint the English landscape—when I do think of her, it is to wish I could tell all the parents in the world about her, as a warning against the promiscuous governess and against leaving any governess unwatched. Better the poorest boarding-school, where there is the safety of publicity, a thousand times. In L—— I had a married cousin, whose little bridesmaid I had been, and whose baby, that I was allowed to nurse on a footstool, lured me to stay with her once or twice; but I clung to her side all the time lest perchance I should sight Miss H—— half-a-mile off, after she had left our employ and lost all power over me. One day at church—great St Margaret's, so full of people—I caught a distant glimpse of the dull, sallow face, and nearly fainted as I stood.

Happily, there were other and more wholesome memories connected with that attic room. But it was still a tragedy that came first to my mind when I thought of Miss H——'s successor, Miss W——. For it was in her reign that I very nearly committed suicide.

She was not like—nobody was like—Miss H——, but she was not above using power unfairly when she was put out. I had been nasty to her in some way, and she returned the compliment by formulating a specific complaint of me to father—actually of me, his queen, to him, my devoted slave. She was a pretty young woman, and he, poor man, just as human as could be. He used to take her walks of an evening when he thought she needed exercise, and on other evenings would sit entranced for hours while she sang "Should he Upbraid" and "Good-bye, Sweetheart" and "When the Swallows homeward fly," and scores of other nice things, to him. And that accounts now, although it did not then, for the astounding circumstance that he punished me at her behest. I was not whipped, of course, but I was sent to my room in disgrace and ordered to stay there. Never shall I forget my mingled astonishment, rage and despair under the unprecedented calamity. I would not have minded, I thought, if I had really done the thing she had accused me of. But I was an innocent victim, and it was father—father—who had been set against me! Simply I could not bear it. I resolved to put an end to my wretched existence there and then. "When he comes and finds me dead upon the floor, then he will be sorry," was the reflection that was to console me in my last moments. But, although I crept into mother's room and ransacked her medicine cupboard for the fatal dose, I did not find it; I lived to make friends with father again, and to suffer many more hours of anguish over troubles that were not worth it.

Another episode of Miss W——'s reign came to my mind when I could clear it of the smoke of the darker memories. The brother and sister next below me were the victims of her wrath on this occasion. I was away from home, and my sister was promoted to the attic room and my place in the governess's bed. She noticed, as I had done, Miss W——'s habit of performing half her evening toilet by candlelight and the rest in the dark; she discovered that the unseen part of the process consisted in dabbing the skin with Rowland's Kalydor for the improvement of a much-valued complexion. She told the second brother—a person of humour—who promptly turned the knowledge to account. Together they unearthed the secret bottle of Kalydor, adulterated the contents with ink, re-hid it in its supposed safe place. Night came, and an evening party. Miss W—— dressed herself with special care and splendour, and duly extinguished her candles before applying the finishing touch. She had fine shoulders and arms, now well displayed, and was particularly careful to anoint them thoroughly with her favourite cosmetic. Then she swept downstairs. We had dark staircases and dim halls then, and somehow she did not realise the situation until the drawing-room lights and the eyes and laughs of the assembled company revealed it to her. I am sorry I did not see the dramatic dénouement. There were violent hysterics, I was told, and a terrible hullabaloo. Father, in a towering passion, rushed upstairs and thrashed the children all round, innocent and guilty together, lest he should miss out a possible participant in the crime.

We had two more English governesses, and one French. One of the former had taught a family of cousins and was reported to be very clever; but she had a fiery, ungovernable temper, and did not stay long enough to prove her gifts. She was a tiny woman, and pretty in a bird-like, sharp-nosed, bright-eyed way, and she became engaged to one of the men who admired her; and one day he came to see her, and from the hall where he was taking off his hat and coat overheard her "giving tongue" to our stately youngest aunt, with her customary fierceness and fluency. She was unaware of his propinquity until he marched in to inform her that he had not really known her until that moment, and that, as a consequence of the revelation, his offer of marriage was revoked. It was characteristic of her that she turned on him with a furious repudiation of any desire whatever to be his wife. She died an elderly, if not old, maid some years later.

The other Englishwoman was a dear—and not much else. We loved her, but we did not learn much from her. As for our French companion—it was for French conversation that she was engaged—she was all the time learning English herself. Poor little Eugénie Léonie de B——! She had a white face and big, lustrous black eyes, and pretty frocks, supplied by her mother, herself a governess in an English family of higher consequence than ours. The boys used to tease Eugénie about Waterloo and frogs, and she would burst into rages and tears because her limited vocabulary denied her the power of arguing for her country on equal terms. She was a dear little thing, and we were all fond of her, and she of us; she took the place of another sister while she lived with us, and there was mutual and bitter grief when she went away. But she did not teach us French to any extent. We taught her English instead.

In short, there was not one, I am convinced, amongst them all—with the possible exception of the lady with the temper—who could have passed a proper examination in the subjects she professed to teach. No one asked for a certificate of competency other than her own word and that of her friends. Miss W—— certainly had the warrant of the principal of the best ladies' school in L——, but there was no warrant for principals of schools. They conducted their own examinations and gave judgment in their own way, which might be any way. All I learned effectually during my brief experience of boarding-school was a long poem by N. P. Willis; I was letter-perfect in it for break-up day, but, when the moment came for me to distinguish myself and the school, stage fright paralysed me and I could not utter a word. At least, that is the only scholastic achievement that I can now recall to mind.

In the final result we were able to read and write—not "cypher," in my case; and I could play the piano pretty well (by ear), and my brothers vastly better—especially the eldest—and, later on, one sister also. But that was because music was a passion born in us; it had to come out, wild or cultivated, and our teachers could take little credit for such proficiency as we attained. Instead of making me read scores and understand them, they played my new pieces over to me before setting me to them. It was not only a labour-saving system, but produced the most immediately effective results. I was a brilliant performer of "Woodlands" (descriptive of a gathering and bursting storm and the warbling of little birds after it), and of the "Duet in D," before I could puzzle out a hymn-tune that had not been sung or played to me. The elder brother, who went to school in L—— (whence he used to be brought home suddenly every now and then, at death's door, for mother to nurse to life again), had lessons from a master and the advantage of knowing something of the basis of the art; yet his music was before all things the instinctive speech and poetry of a soul that was not made for this prosaic world. It was hard to get him to play to listeners—to "show off" what was really a great accomplishment from the most common point of view. But in twilight and firelight, or with only me, who was his constant chum, his extemporisation was so exquisite that I used to sit and cry as I listened to it. Once a great musician listened to it, unknown to him, and told our mother that her son was destined to set the Thames on fire some day. He died at seventeen. When he was too weak to sit on the music stool by himself, I used to stand behind him and support his weight against my chest to enable him to enjoy his communion with the divine and beautiful as long as he could.

He died in March; and in June of the same year the second brother, two and a half years younger, was laid beside him. This dear boy, so sweet-tempered, so gay, so unselfish, hid facts that should have been attended to while the other was yet alive, because all his thoughts were for him and he never had any for himself, and his own life was in danger before it was known that he was ill. But an organist friend had promised him the glory of playing the whole Sunday service in a neighbouring church (St Peter's, Great Yarmouth, where we were living at the time), and, with his complaint already past hope, he went off to this task, simply full of it, and performed it triumphantly. It was his last act in life, and through all his delirium until he died his fingers were playing up and down the sheet, showing that his stricken brain made music for him to the last.

The sister was like them both in that one and only respect. She was a delightful extemporiser on the piano, expressing thus all her wayward moods as they alternated so quickly in her passionate little soul. Continually she surprised herself as well as us with some beautiful improvisation, and then burst into tears because she could not repeat it. And all that budding genius to be swept out of the world, without a chance to flower and bear fruit! It is a sad reflection—the waste of valuable things in life, the persistent superfluity of the valueless.

However, such gifts as the then numerous family could lay claim to were hidden as it were in the "plain egg of the nightingale" while our development was in the hands of the governesses. They were intellectually limited, spiritually common, all unlearned, and the majority of them underbred. The fact being that, taking the average of the seven, they fairly represented their class—the governess class of my young days. Naturally, in this case, we more or less fairly represented the class of those who were supposed to be well educated.

But I must except the youngest aunt from this category. She was a governess—but not the average governess—and it was never her opinion that we were well educated. She frequently deplored my own lack of opportunities to improve, and made generous, if vain, efforts to provide them. Before she entered upon her career as instructress of foreign young high-mightinesses, she spent years on her own studies abroad, and she offered to keep me at school in Germany if my parents would send me to her there. I know we were all fools, father, mother and self, but I clung to them and they clung to me, and "No, no, a thousand times no!" was our unanimous reply. "You are standing in the child's light," wrote the youngest aunt from Heidelberg, but that was not fair, for they would have sent me and broken their hearts over it if I had wanted to go. But if the youngest aunt had invited me to join her in heaven, the joylessness of the prospect would have been the same. So she instituted a system of correspondence, as the best she could do in the circumstances. I was to write long and regular letters to her, to which she was to reply, correcting their grammar and composition and otherwise enlightening my neglected mind. I performed my part of this contract not wholly without pleasure in it, and I have no doubt that I owe to her my first taste for literature and the bent towards authorship which afterwards became a fixed line. I remember that it was to her I submitted an early MS., while as yet it was a secret that I wrote stories. This one was all about moated granges and Mediæval castles and the splendours of what I imagined to be high life. How just her criticism was! And how—naturally, on that account—it hurt my feelings then, when I was professionally so young and innocent. "A boudoir," smiled she, "is not a room that a lady keeps all to herself, as she does her bedroom. And she does not have 'tapers' on the dressing-table, but candles. And why don't you write what you understand?" That advice, which is of the best to-day, was astonishingly good for those days.

In later years her letters were like novels themselves. Her reticence about things one burned to know concerning the private lives of her royal employers was impenetrable, but outside of that what food for the romantic imagination! There was the death of her pupil, a young princess of S——, and later the semi-dissolution of her father's kingdom—two events that the youngest aunt took bitterly to heart and discoursed of eloquently. There was that mandate of the Czar to her and another pupil, wintering in Dresden, to return instantly to St Petersburg, and the journey of the party in bullet-proof railway carriages through Poland in revolt. The train crawled along so slowly, on account of the fighting on the line, that they were nearly starved, and when it reached a station where food might be obtained no one but the youngest aunt had the pluck to leave its shelter. The English tutor of her pupil's brother (the children were fatherless wards of the Russian Emperor) cowered in his corner paralysed with fright; the youngest aunt could not find words to express her contempt for him. She gathered up her skirts—it was necessary to hold them high, she said, because the ground was running with blood—and sallied forth to forage alone, returning with a little black bread and some dirty water, procured with great difficulty and by a heavy bribe. I remember that the youngest aunt was all indignation against "ungrateful Poland," which shows how the finest judgment can be affected by the personal point of view. At the end of the perilous journey there was a solemn service of thanksgiving for the deliverance of the Lord's Anointed out of the hands of bloodthirsty rebels. Her sketches of these and other stirring scenes taught me something of the world outside my village or country town; they supplied plots for many early romances that never saw the light.

On the whole, school work was a deadly uninteresting, and therefore unprofitable, business in my time, no matter what the qualifications of teachers. The notion of making it a pleasure as well as a discipline, of breathing into its dry bones any breath of knowledgeable life, seemed not to occur to anybody. The idea that it was anything but a penalty for being young certainly never occurred to us. It is not surprising when one considers other aspects of the social system prevailing at the period. But it does seem strange that a theory of education so essentially stupid on the face of it should still persist to the extent we see in these more enlightened days. And yet—not so strange. Nothing is really strange when you think it out. The schools, most humanly and naturally, keep their old alliance with the Church, clinging to the old dogmas which have been the roots of their being and the symbols of their power for so long; inevitably resisting, while they can, on behalf of all sorts of vested interests, the Spirit of Progress which they must know to be ultimately irresistible. When I see growing children who have spent morning and afternoon at school fagging wearily at "prep" through the evening when they ought to be recruiting with a game or in their beds, I marvel at the hidebound conservatism which can thus ignore the laws of health and the rights of the individual, freely recognised as paramount in other directions. But again—what is there to marvel at? There are scores of good, common-sense business men to whom Compulsory Greek is a sacred thing, and there are thousands and thousands of truly saintly women who would not have a hand laid on the Athanasian Creed for anything. Not to speak of the innumerable brave fellows, souls of honour, flowers of chivalry, who believe as devoutly as they believe in God that the world would go to pieces utterly without its armies and navies.

How often we hear elderly people gushing over their school days! "Ah, those were the happy days!" When I hear them I know exactly what they mean—not the school part of school days, but the free parts in between. I am not of those who sentimentally deceive themselves in this matter—the school parts to me were never happy. I have always known it. And when I came back to the scenes of my schooldays, when I stood in that quiet road at D—— and looked up at the window of the room under the crow-stepped gable, I realised with a shudder how unutterably wretched they had been sometimes.

But it is time I dragged my spirit eyes from that sad little nook in the house of dreams. I will not look at it again. I will take Memory through the ghost-haunted attics behind it and down the twisty stairs, to the lower floors and the garden and the company of my dear family, where she can play about much more cheerfully.

[CHAPTER V]

HALCYON DAYS

There is always one outstanding association to fly in your face ahead of every other when you encounter a thing or person once connected with your life, that has been severed from it for a long time. And when I looked at the front door like a church door, simultaneously apprehending its interesting character as a door, the first thing I thought of was—valentines.

The word says nothing to my youthful reader. But, oh, dear contemporary for whom especially I write, you who took part with me in those revels that are no more, what it says to us! Certainly our diversions of that time—when we were hardly into our teens, and when we were as innocent as we were young—were so few and simple compared with those of our children at the same age that we got more out of one of them than they do out of a miscellaneous dozen; but I am allowing for that when I say that for this particular diversion, and one or two more of a like kind, no corresponding diversion of the present day offers anything like adequate compensation. There are bloodless creatures, that forget they were ever young, who point to the Christmas card as the improved substitute for our valentine. Christmas card, indeed! So common, so obvious, so lacking in individual human interest! What nonsense!

We know why they do it. But where is the sense of frowning upon the innocent manifestations of nature in girls and boys, such as were called forth by the valentine, the sprig of mistletoe, and certain other of our games of olden times which were as gates ajar into the Promised Land, with their stolen and yet not unauthorised kisses and anonymous love-tokens? They gave honest outlet to the exuberance of healthy youth, sweet and wholesome in its free play, but corrupting in secrecy like everything deprived of air. At least such is my opinion, looking back upon the pranks of my early days. The valentines that came to me in such abundance on the 14th of February were simply symbols of so many lovers and of how they severally regarded me. Who sent this? Who sent that? Who lauds my beauty in such ardent verse? Who asks me to be his? The boy I like (though I may never have exchanged a word with him)? Or the boy I can't bear? The best of the valentine was that, as a rule, it did not tell. The pleasures of imagination and tickled curiosity were not impaired by any gross attempt on the part of the sender to trespass beyond the privilege of the day. Where, then, was the harm?

I became old enough to take my part in this delicate dalliance while we lived in D——, and it was in this house of the church door that my most interesting Valentine's Days were spent. They were indeed momentous occasions. The morning postman was not the chief purveyor of the wonderfully devised tokens; it was the personal delivery after dark that was most fruitful, as it was most exciting. On Valentine's eve or Valentine's night we sat around the fire in the music-room, eyes shining, ears cocked, muscles tense for the spring. Rat-tat-tat! We flew down the steps through the drawing-room, through the hall to the front door, to catch the visitor whose business and whose point of honour was not to let us catch him. A banged gate, a vanishing shadow in the fog or snow, mocked the strained sight and hearing; but plain upon the doorstep—that very doorstep—gleamed a large white envelope enclosing a "song without words" for somebody. It might be from anybody—a boy who had only seen you at church, a greybeard friend of your father's (I was the pet of old gentlemen from babyhood), the man-servant of the house or that innocent young sweetheart of your innocent first love, who had this great chance to declare (without declaring) himself to be such. A sheaf of trophies—if you were a favourite of Fortune, as I must have been—when the day was over, and the long-continuing pleasure of conjecture, possibly of knowledge, afterwards. I do not care what anybody says, it was a great and glorious institution.

And the mistletoe, of which I spoke just now—oh, the mistletoe! What was not enshrined for us in that insignificant bit of weed! Two leaf blades and one berry were enough to work the charm—to turn a humdrum house into a world of romance, filled with the interest of that passion which is the most interesting thing in life, without its carking cares and its deadly responsibilities. Like a trap in the run of a wild animal, a pale sprig would be hidden for special purposes by a more ardent player of the game, but that was considered to be a breach of rules; in full view above the most frequented doorway, or at any rate in some place known to all, one of the strangest of our small symbols for big things honestly revealed itself, to be sought or shunned, dawdled or darted past, remembered or forgotten, as the case might be. It must have been a source of intensest interest to the youths and maidens making Christmas fun together, knowing what they knew, feeling what they felt, interchanging their sentimental diplomacies according to the instincts and desires of their time of life; for I know what in a lesser degree it meant to the younger children. I am sure that I was a very modest little girl (there was my treatment of my first love-letter to prove it), and that I did not walk—at any rate, that I did not run—after the little boys to whom I inclined; nevertheless, the mistletoe concerned me as much as anybody. The exquisite excitement of circumventing the boys to whom I did not incline was fun and interest enough.

It was forty years and more since I had seen mistletoe when that July I walked in the grounds of the fine old rectory in Priory Lane—the garden into which our balls and arrows used to overshoot themselves—and the rector's wife, with whom I had been lunching, gathered and offered me a little sprig of green stuff.

"You don't know what that is," said she.

I did not, because it was summer and the pearly berries had not formed.

"Mistletoe," said she.

Talismanic word! I folded it in paper and brought it home. It is in Australia with me now.

Valentine's Day is hardly a name to be remembered now when the 14th of February comes round. The date was far behind us when we arrived in England, but I am sure the festival must be dead in its native land, and it has never lived during my time in this. And as for Christmas—we could not stay long enough to see an English Christmas again, but I think, if I had seen it, I should have found it no more like the old Christmas than the one I spent at sea. They belonged to their age, those old Christmases of ours, to children not so critical and sophisticated as the children of to-day.

Fragrant memories of Christmas hung about that old house at D——. Happy Christmases with no governesses around! And such tremendous affairs they were! Long, long before the day its heralds were all about us: the choice fowls set apart for fattening; the ox selected that was to make himself famous with a prize, if possible, before the butcher turned him into Christmas beef; the solemn mixing of the Christmas pudding, at which the youngest baby had to assist (the pudding divided into dozens of puddings boiled in the big copper and hung up in their cloths, to be used in instalments until Christmas came again); the making of the mincemeat in the same wholesale manner (big brown jarfuls, also to last through the year), and of the Christmas cakes, which were so rich that keeping improved them, and the production of which therefore was only limited by the number of canisters available in which to store them; these were matters of vital interest ere autumn had fairly gone. For the Feast of the Nativity was above all things a feast in the popular sense of the word. Loaded shelves in the pantry and an overflowing table, plenty for everybody and everything of the best, was the order not of the day, or of the week but for the month or two that stood for the "season" with these old-time provincial revellers. When we lived in the country before coming to D—— two dishes in particular were conspicuous on our bill of fare—Christmas dishes only, so far as I can recollect. One was a game pie, in size and shape resembling a milliner's bonnet box. Its walls were self-supporting and covered with pastry ornamentation in relief; its inside was jelly close-packed with miscellaneous game birds and bits of ham and veal and forcemeat and things; the usual game pie, I suppose (I don't know, it is so many years since I tasted one), but extra big and fine in honour of Christmas. The other dish was a round of "Hunters' Beef"—very well named since it used to be in great request for hunting sandwiches. It was beef rubbed all over every day for three weeks with a certain dry mixture of sugar, salts and spices, and then baked for six hours in an earthern crock under a pile of shred suet, a meal crust and a sheet of brown paper. It seems to me that I have never tasted real spiced beef since. It was used in thin slices with bread and butter, not eaten like ordinary meat at the substantial meals, and lasted a great while. When Christmas was nearly upon us—governess gone, and all the carking cares of the past year thrown overboard—the bakings and roastings were tremendous, the excitement of preparation turned all heads.

At our farmhouse a cartload of evergreens used to come from our grandfather's woods, sometimes through the snow. Here in the town we still managed to get enough; always the Christmas tree in its largest size. Every room had to be adorned as lavishly as they now adorn the churches, whereas the churches were put off with a bough of holly stuck into each seat end. The Christmas tree was planted in a tub on the drawing-room floor—stripped of carpet and furniture for the nightly games and dances (this floor was not of stone)—and usually the top had to be cut off to get it under the ceiling. Its graduated layers of arms bore dozens upon dozens of coloured wax tapers (the little tin sconces for them were stored from year to year), and about the same number of pendent glass balls, apples of gold and silver on the dark green boughs. The substantial fruit, the presents, were in numbers sufficient to stock a small bazaar. Mother and aunts and family friends had been working on them for months. If the drawing-room could not be shut to children the tree was jealously screened, for a day or two before the great night, which was a party night. It was the young men and maidens who enjoyed themselves in this interval, while the little ones hung about passages and peepholes in burning curiosity and suspense. The enchanting moment came when the party tea was over and a succeeding half-hour of thrilling anticipation; the drawing-room door was flung wide and we rushed through in a crowd towards the splendid blazing wonder in the middle of the room, sighing forth our "Oh! oh!" of ecstasy.

The stage-managers ranged us in a circle around it, all goggle-eyed, half stunned with the suddenness of our joy, and someone came round with a bag of tickets—round and round, until each had half-a-dozen or more. Oh, who would get No.1, the great doll at the top of the tree?—or No.2, the work-box on the tub beneath (the tub hidden in green stuff, mingled with pink glazed calico)? There were great prizes amongst the many little ones, and some that I remember were quite remarkable. One was a board—very difficult to fix to the tree safely—on which a party of dolls were celebrating a wedding, the bride in her veil, with her bewreathed bridesmaids, the little men in coats and trousers, the surpliced parson, all complete. Such time and trouble were to spare for children in those days! The steps were brought in and a man mounted them to detach the articles from the upper boughs. A woman might set herself on fire—once she did, and there was a gallant rescue, and frequently a taper ignited a flimsy toy or set a green branch smoking. Doubtless there were heart-burnings also over the caprices of Fortune in the distribution of the gifts, but I cannot see blurs of that sort on the shining picture now.

Santa Claus is still much alive, so I need not describe his doings. I only hope the children of to-day enjoy shivering awake for half the night and making themselves ill with the edible contents of their stockings before daylight as much as we did. As for the delicious lurid function, snapdragon, is it obsolete in England yet? It does not come, like Santa Claus, into the scheme of child entertainment in Australia. There would be a difficulty in finding the requisite depth of darkness on Christmas evenings here. Besides, a supper of raw raisins cannot be good for the infant stomachs. I would not give it to my own children, but still I am glad that the mothers of old were in some things less faddy than we are. One of the treasures of my collection is the weird scene of the magic bowl and the spectral faces around it—the delightful terror of the little girls, the heroic courage of the little boys who seized for them the blazing morsels they dared not touch themselves. A tender memory of that boy to whom I inclined, who shot himself (by cocking a stiff-jointed gun with foot instead of finger), pictures him gallantly fighting the flames on my behalf.

The Waits, I believe, are heard in the streets of England still. But not, I fancy, on country road and garden paths, guests of the domestic hearth at midnight, a nondescript rabble under no ecclesiastical control, making their own fun, as they then did. Blue-nosed, beery, hilarious, in woollen mitts and comforters, drinking good luck to a dozen hosts in turn and thinking of nothing but how they were enjoying themselves, they are not quite adequately represented to us older folk by the better-drilled but unspontaneous choir-boy. He is like the Christmas card for which we have exchanged the valentine—a shadow replacing the substance, to our thinking.

The choir of the old times was the congregation, led by the clerk in the three-decker. We went to service on Christmas morning, as in duty bound, and sang "Praise God, from Whom all blessings flow," whether we had singing voices or not, and were likewise audible and hearty with the responses, as believing them our own; and when we came out—good, unsophisticated Christians, exchanging our "Happy Christmas" with everybody we met—the church was content to let us go for the remainder of the day. We went home to our immense dinner (with dessert that lasted through the afternoon), our festive tea, crowned with the Christmas cake, our blindman's buff and turn-the-trencher and drop-the-handkerchief in the cleared drawing-room, our snapdragons, our punch-bowl, our adventures under the mistletoe.

The drawing-room, when not cleared, could not be closed to family use, like the majority of the middle-class parlours of the past (I might almost say of the present also), being the highway to the front door, to the garden-playground, and to the music-room, which was the sitting-room. Its four doors were constantly opening and shutting, and it must have been a cave of the winds in winter, although I do not remember it. Strips of crumb-cloth marked the crossing footpaths, warning us to keep off the grass—i.e. the geometrical-patterned green and crimson carpet; they were taken up whenever it was surmised that "people might be coming," according to that curiously petty but intense concern for a genteel (however false) appearance, which was one of the things I had, mistakenly but naturally, taken for granted that England had grown out of long ago. The room was still the reception-room for callers and company, and all my mother's artistic skill, which only distinguished itself the more for having so little money at the back of it, had been expended upon its adornment.

When I think how that artistic skill was exercised, I have a foolish impulse to shudder and to smile. When I think again, I have to ask myself, "Why should I?" Further reflection convinces me that its manifestations were admirable. To say the least, they were not necessarily in bad taste then, although they would and ought to be so now. But there is far more than that to say. The handicraft of the women of the mid-Victorian era had the precious quality of finish and thoroughness, than which there is none more worthy. Careful, delicate, faithful work, no matter on what article expended, was the note of excellence, and the longer I live the more I respect and love it. Such fancy-work proper as adorned this old parlour of ours I do not wish to see reproduced, but it was appropriate to its day and a credit to her who was responsible for it.

She had a sort of settee-sofa under the window on the garden side. It was covered with many squares of finest "wool-work," joined together. There was a different design—vase of flowers, basket of flowers, wreath, bouquet—in each square, although material and ground colour were the same; and the number of them represented so many girl friends who had combined to work them and present her with the sofa on her marriage. It certainly was a graceful idea, cleverly carried out. And wool-work was really very fascinating. With a piece of canvas, a bundle of neatly-sorted Berlin wools, and a coloured pattern of flowers of every hue—the more intricate the better—I was quite happy. I also liked working out peacocks and other weird devices into antimacassars, with crochet needle and white cotton, although not so well. I must have made miles of "open-work" (the modern broderie Anglaise, only better) for underclothes, first and last. Once I made a bead basket to hang by glittering bead chains between draped netted-and-darned window-curtains. I knitted rag rugs and silk purses, and sections of a great quilt for a spare bed. I did elaborate geometrical patchwork for other quilts, and fine marking of names (learned from my baby sampler) on linen with engrained red cotton; and watchguards in black silk and gorgeous slippers and winter mitts and comforters for father; and mats for lamps and vases, and so on and so on.

But mother was really an artist, because she did not follow patterns, but designed things herself. When she needed curtain cornices for the tops of those windows, and could not afford the gilded, fender-like affairs that were correct and desirable, she nailed deal boards together, covered them with leather, and then with a design of leather flowers or grapes with vine-leaves, which, when varnished, imposed upon the spectator as a carving in wood. Now we would prefer the honest deal, no doubt—I would, at any rate—but then there was not a person of taste who would have done so. She made open wood-carving of leather-work applied to stout cardboard, cutting away the latter from the interstices of the pattern embossed. In the treatment of a pair of flower-holders that used to stand on a table under the mirror between the garden window and the garden door, she substituted a scarlet coating made of sealing-wax for the dark wood-stain; her leather-work then called itself coral. As for her wax flowers, they were truly beautiful. She was not content to make up the boxfuls of petals prepared by the trade, but must needs copy flowers out of the field and garden. I do not know how she found time for all she did, but she seemed to do everything, and always to do it right. My faith in her ingenuity and resourcefulness was as my faith in the omnipotence of God.

It was in that drawing-room of her adornment that we held festival on the afternoon of our famous wedding-day. It rained, and the amusement for the guests—after the great breakfast in the music-room and the departure of bride and bridegroom—was to practise archery upon a target in the wet garden from the shelter of the house. The arrows from door and window went wide over the garden walls, and the scared face of the rector popped up in alarm at intervals as they hurtled into his domain. It was the son of our old neighbours at T—— (the House of the Doll), who, unknown to any of us at the time, pointed a moral for the incautious parent who deposits with his (or her) infant offspring evidence upon which they will some day rise up to judge him. H. was a very smart young fellow, according to the notions of the time, and he forgathered with a pretty cousin of ours, daughter of my father's eldest brother, with whom my father was at feud over a lawsuit and not on speaking terms. Her parents forbade the match, and she came to mine—the hostile camp—for succour. Enthusiastically we took up her cause, and, having given her all facilities for courtship, gave her the finest wedding that could be compassed from our house. Not only that, but drove her many miles behind white-favoured postilions to the church of her own parish, possibly to "cheek" her family, who naturally held aloof, although it was rumoured that they watched the passing of the bridal carriages from some secret ambush. Of course, we young ones never doubted for a moment that they were wholly malignant and in the wrong; we were as sure as we were of night and day that our father and mother could not possibly make mistakes.

While the happy pair were honeymooning, we assisted Mrs H., the bridegroom's mother, to prepare for them what we thought an ideal home in L——, a house so towny and stylish, compared with the farm homesteads in which we had been reared, that we were lost in our sense of the occupants' luck and bliss. I had been their little bridesmaid, and I now became their frequent visitor; I suppose their attentions to me were a return for our ill-omened hospitality to them. I used to sit on a stool in the firelit dusk, totally disregarded, while, on the other side of the hearth, H. nursed Cousin E. upon his knee and they whispered together. Later on, I sat on the same stool to nurse the baby, E. hanging over me to gloat upon him and assure herself that he was safe in my arms.

The other day I saw that house again, and, looking up at the windows, looked through them upon those past scenes with, oh! such different eyes. According to precedent, H. proved himself, very early in the day, to be the bad lot his wife's people had suspected. The first baby was the last, because there was not time for more. The young father lived beyond his means for a year or two, neglected his business, took to drink, went under, and left the young mother and child to the charity of the relatives who had probably foreseen how it would be. And now that I am older than they were I think of my parents' part in the matter, once so unquestioningly endorsed, and I shake my head. So will my children shake their heads over remembered acts of mine which, at the doing, were even as the decrees of Providence. Doubtless they have done so many a time.

In my flying visits to D—— I was drawn again and again to the neighbourhood of that old house. Any walk that I took for the sake of a walk led past it, and I stopped at the two gates every time, because I could not help it. The second gate, opening into the field that was part of the premises, had its separate associations. Here roamed Taffy, when he chose to keep in bounds, a white pony given to my eldest brother by his grandfather, but for his long lifetime the useful servant and beloved friend of the whole family; a dear, sweet-natured humorous creature, human in his affections and intelligence. Taffy walked about the domestic domain like a dog; he undid every fastening of every gate that attempted to confine his rambles. He used to come to the schoolroom window when we were at lessons and watch his chance to grab a mouthful of hair. When mother and I made our journeys together to see her parents, some fifteen miles off, we used to stop at a halfway inn to get a basinful of porter for Taffy, who loved it and drank it down like a Christian; he would not pass that inn without it. When thirsty at home he sought the pump in the stableyard, took the handle in his teeth and rattled it up and down, and as soon as water trickled from the spout applied his mouth thereto. When I have told this story to my present family, who never knew Taffy, tolerant and superior smiles have accused me of drawing the long bow; so I was pleased when a sister of mine, lately arrived from England after a thirty years' separation from me, was happily inspired to say at table before them all (we were speaking of old times), "Oh, do you remember Taffy and the pump?" proceeding to tell the tale again exactly as I had told it. Thus Taffy and I got tardy justice done us.

Here, too, in a memorable year, Wombwell's Menagerie established itself. It was the half of the business which the original Wombwell had left divided between a son and daughter, and the latter was the proprietress and travelling with it. My father let his field to her for the few days that must have been Winnold Fair days (St Wynewall originally—a fair held here annually at the beginning of March, literally from time immemorial, as, according to a deed of the reign of Edward the Confessor, it was flourishing in his day, and there are no records to tell how long before that); for I recall the state of the temperature. Which reminds me of an old Norfolk rhyme much in use amongst us, to indicate what might be expected in the way of weather at the season of the Fair:

"First come David, then come Chad,
Then come 'Winnle' as if he was mad."

So Mrs Edwards (I think that was her name) brought her Wombwell's Menagerie to our field. The numerous Black Marias of the caravan filed into the gate before our popping eyes, the elephant walking as one has heard of the lady doing in the sedan chair that had the bottom out; we could only see his monstrous feet and ankles underneath the house that he carried around him, and those massive members were partly swathed in bandages, because, we were told, the poor thing suffered from chilblains. The vehicles were formed into a hollow square, the arena roofed over (it was deliciously warm to go into out of the cold open air), and the grass floor thickly bedded in clean straw, from which we sifted treasure-trove of nuts and lost articles when the show was gone. The shutters were taken from the cages on the inner side, the entrance steps put down, and all was ready for business. There was a band, of course.

The contract gave our household the privilege of free access. I need not say that it was utilised to the utmost. We had special holidays on purpose. But the cream of those exciting days was Sunday, when there was no show and no public, and we were admitted to the bosom of the family, to see how it lived behind the scenes. In the afternoon of that day my mother went into the field to show a little neighbourly attention to the proprietress, taking me with her. It was one of the most interesting calls I ever made. We found Mrs Edwards a very superior lady, who did not travel with the show except now and then, to amuse herself while her children were away at school (her daughter, I think she said, was "finishing abroad"); she had her good house somewhere, like other ladies. She was in silk attire, very stylish, and her private van was a thing of luxury indeed; also she entertained us delightfully. We strolled about the empty arena, and fraternised with the animals. Many of them were let out for exercise; others we were allowed to fondle and converse with. The little gazelle on its slim legs raced round and round in front of the cages, mocking the futile leer and pounce of the great cats that would have intercepted it had circumstances allowed; the monkeys tweaked our ears and pulled the trimming off our hats; the great elephant swayed about like a moving mountain, and condescended to take our buns when we mustered courage to present them. Unforgettable Sunday afternoon! Almost worthy to be ranked with the splendid day at Port Said. The memory of it was in my mind when, on my second Sunday afternoon in England, I was behind the scenes in the "Zoo" at Regent's Park, dear little birds and beasties climbing over me and showing off their pretty tricks to me for love and not for money.

But, ah, the nights! The dark nights up in that attic bedroom, when the wintry wind bore the heart-thrilling plaints of homesick lions and tigers—so awfully close to one! Oh, suppose they should get out! I have never been conspicuously strong-minded when alone in the dark—I have too much imagination—and I used to burrow deep down in the bedclothes to shut out those appallingly suggestive sounds.

Time seems to deal tenderly with everything in England, and the two old gates were the very same old gates, apparently. Approaching them through the town, I passed the same old shops, with the same old names on some of them. Next door, across Priory Lane, the same family of doctors still lived, father and son in contiguous establishments; only the son of old was now the father, and there was a new son. The daughters of the parent house, young ladies of the old days, I found living still, to remember and to entertain me; one of them, a widow approaching her ninetieth year, was the most charmingly nimble-minded and witty person of her age that I ever met. Her intellectual audacity impressed me as one of the most striking incidents of my return to her little town. She had lived there always, and was yet unsubdued by the stodgy atmosphere—as awake to the humour of the ways of a little English town (in which, as she expressed it, "twopence-ha'penny would not speak to twopence") as I was. She was handsome too—altogether a dear.

Just opposite her old home, at the beginning (or end) of the street, swung an inn signboard the sight of which was more delightful to me than all the priceless canvases that I had been privileged to make acquaintance with at Grosvenor House a few days previously. This was the Rampant Horse of olden times—the very same red horse pawing space, his colour faded out, but his familiar lineaments intact; and it was a part of my phenomenal luck at that time to see it just when I did, for the next time I passed that way the sign had been taken down, doubtless to be "restored." I am convinced that it had not been touched in the half-century that I had been away, but just waiting there to greet me.

On the other side of my old home, along the London Road, I walked in the Past every step of the way. There was the same old workhouse, which we used to visit after church on Christmas mornings to see the paupers wolfing their roast beef and plum pudding, beside it the Court House, full of memories of concert nights and entertainments—particularly of a demonstration by a girl clairvoyant, who, while "under the influence," informed a member of our party that her son was lying dangerously ill at his tutor's house in Heidelberg; which was afterwards proved to be the case, although this was the first she heard of it. D—— has a Town Hall now, a Jubilee Town Hall, but in my day the Court House seems to have been the place for public functions; and I have an acute remembrance of sitting through an evening on a ledge but a few inches wide, being crowded off the benches and too proud to ask for a lap. My back aches and the calves of my legs curl up now when it comes across me.

Further on, C—— Hall by the roadside—unchanged, except that I found it temporarily tenantless. My little girl-contemporaries who used to live there wore white pants to the feet, frilled around the ankles, under their short skirts, like Miss Kenwigs. Where, I wondered, as I looked at the blank windows, where were they now? Across the road, in front of the hall, lay the park-like lands belonging to it, the beautiful turf only matched by the beautiful trees—all as it used to be. There I saw myself, a little thing in a new pink frock, dancing about with my mother and a crowd of busy ladies amongst long plank tables, at which the poor folk of the town and for miles around were being feasted on roast beef and plum pudding, while brass bands brayed and flags fluttered in the sun. The occasion was the Celebration of Peace after the Crimean War.

Then the village of D——, object of so many walks in the governess days—I tramped thither one fresh and sunny morning when I wanted a good constitutional, and, as usual when I found the door open, I entered the church. The clergyman, in a rapid gabble, was reciting the daily service; he had one daily—in the very middle of the working morning, in a parish containing only those who were bound to be hard at it earning their living and attending to the needs of families. When, oh! when will parsons learn common-sense? It was a relief to see that these parishioners were not seduced from the path of duty by his well-intentioned invitation. The whole congregation was embodied in one extremely old man, whose infirmities had long disqualified him for the work of life. For him, I thought, it would have been enough at this hour to leave the place open, to comfort him, when he liked to wander in, with its divine suggestions. He could not have followed the breathless patter of words with his deaf ears.

However, perhaps this is not my business.

[CHAPTER VI]

EARLIEST RECOLLECTIONS

I went on from D—— into the deeper and more beautiful recesses of my native county, the localities associated with my earliest years, the most sacred places of them all. It was early in July, when the rhododendrons, so thick in the woods, had done their flowering, but the trees were in full perfection, and the honeysuckles of the hedges scented the highways.

Two large families of cousins had grown up thereabouts, and some were still clinging to their native soil. All had been unknown to me from the time of our paternal grandfather's death, in 1856, which precipitated the estranging lawsuit—all, that is to say, excepting E., who married from our house. As children we used to shoot veiled glances at each other in church, but that was all the intercourse permitted to us. However, in later years, when we had sense of our own to judge the merits of this old quarrel, one and another of my cousins claimed acquaintance with me through my publishers, and I came to England with several long-standing invitations from them to visit them when I could. M.G., a widow a few years older than myself, was one who had never deserted Norfolk, and whose charming home was in the very heart of my own country, within a drive of all the places I most desired to see again. An "abbey," it was called, a farmhouse now, divorced from its lands, one of those beautiful English dwellings, several hundreds of years old, that I was always adoringly and enviously in love with; and attached to it were the ruins of a religious house, which the county directory informed me was founded for Cistercians in 1251, and granted at the Dissolution to the family whose present representative, of the same name, owns it still, my cousin's friend and landlord. From the old garden, out of the stupendous trees (are there trees in England to rival Norfolk trees?), rose fragments of the walls of that old abbey, broken arches and windows with some stone tracery left in them; and there were damp depressions in which lumps of carved stone were jumbled up with weeds and ragged bushes, the crypts which Time had filled, but not wholly filled, with the rain-washings of centuries. Imagine my joy in such surroundings! And within the comparatively modern but still antique (it looked to me Elizabethan) residence, nothing to clash with the grey stone walls and mullioned and labelled windows, all simple dignity, frugal refinement, warmth, ease, comfort. It was a delight to me merely to walk up and down the stairs, wide and shallow and solid, echoing the footfalls of generations of gentlefolk at every step; especially when at the top lay the cosiest of beds and at the bottom the cheeriest of quiet firesides.

Although it was July we had a fire all the time—the little touch that made us kin, my cousin and me. The old prejudice against lighting a fire after spring cleaning or before a certain fixed date in autumn, coincident with the exchange of lace window-curtains for stuff ones, or some such annual domestic rite, had not died out in rural England since I had been away; but here—as soon as I walked in out of the rain on the afternoon of my arrival—the sight of a ruddy blaze, and a well-furnished tea-table beside it, told me that in this remote village I had struck an enlightened woman.

It was so remote a village that there was no way of getting to it from D—— but by driving the whole eight miles. M. sent the landlord of her local inn, her accustomed coachman, an intelligent man whose ancestors had been in service with mine, to fetch me; and he entertained me on the way with the history of the old families whose homes we passed and with whom my family had had more or less intimate relations in the years before he was born, as that history had been enacted within his lifetime and during the later part of mine. The soft grey rain came straight down, and we were both coated and mackintoshed to the eyes. I had to peer from under the edge of my dripping umbrella at the well-known gateways (the lodges more modernised than the mansions they belonged to, so far as I could see the latter through their splendid woods and avenues), the familiar farms and villages, with their fine old churches, all the dear, historic landscape; but, wet as it was, I had to struggle not to make it wetter—and my handkerchief hopelessly buried under my wraps. I tell you, dear sympathetic elderly reader, the memories that flocked along that road to greet me were all but overwhelming. It was, for peculiar and precious charm, the drive of my life—to date; only the one I had next day surpassed it.

It did not rain next day, and Mr B. drove up to the abbey, spick and span, in plum-coloured livery and shiny hat, to take us out for the afternoon. Nice man that he was, with his old family traditions so entwined with mine, he entered with respectful zeal into the spirit of the expedition, undertaking that I should miss nothing of interest to me through default of his. He and M. mapped out the route with care, and as we pursued it he turned on his box seat at intervals of a few minutes, to name each feature as we approached or passed it, and make such comments as seemed called for. Half the time I was standing up in the carriage behind him, straining my eyes to see, at the direction of his outstretched whip, something in the dim distance not yet plain enough to see. And yet, by accident or design, the latter I suspect, in collusion with M., he was driving slowly past the very face of T——, the goal of this pilgrimage, without word or sign, when my roving eye lighting upon it recognised it instantly, without anybody's aid.

Would that I had a photograph of it! For not only was it a good old house surpassing my fancy dreams of it, but it had not visibly changed in the least degree, nor had any of its farm surroundings. Just as I had left it when I was a child I saw it again when I was an old woman; and the whole scene was as familiar to the last detail as if I had been seeing it all the time. The big road gate, the pond within, the barn, the garden (raised above the surrounding meadow), the house itself, its generous front windows as wide as they were deep, and the kitchen at the side, and the dairy running back to the elder-tree where they used to kill the fowls—everything was in its old place, and no sign of decadence visible from the point at which I viewed it. This permanence of English things was so remarkable to me—because in Australia nothing is permanent, but altering itself to bigger or better every minute of the time.

As at the moment of sudden death the complete panorama of one's past life is before the mental eye—as one dreams a whole story in multitudinous detail between the housemaid's morning knock at one's door and the echo of it that wakes one (if those legendary happenings are to be believed)—so I seemed to live all my little childhood over again in the few minutes that Mr B. held his horse on the highroad, and I stood at his shoulder to gaze at the place, which, although not my birthplace, still meant for me the beginning of all things. Memory could go no further back than to an infancy that was put to bed in the middle of the day and given meals on its nurse's lap with a spoon. I looked at the nursery window, and instantly thought of a little thing left to cry in its crib, untended and unheard, with feelings so acutely hurt by the unprecedented neglect that the mark was left for evermore; and the occasion, there is evidence to show, was the birth of a sister three years younger than herself.

I looked at the "parlour" window and it was crowded with her. She was just old enough to be "shown off" as the usual prodigy of intelligence by adoring parents. My second earliest memory of myself is as a public singer. They stood me on the big round "centre table" that they might see me as I sang. I did not know the meaning of the words I lisped, yet I had remembered many fragments of them, and the tunes entirely, in spite of having heard neither during the many intervening years. And now an unknown friend in England, General Sir M.G., who fought in the Mutiny, who used to sing them himself before he went to that business, probably at the same time as I sang them, has filled up for me the gaps in the verses of one of my favourite songs, with the remark, which I can so feelingly endorse on my own account, that he wishes he could remember what he reads now as well as he does what attracted him in those old days. Almost simultaneously another friend in England, one of his Majesty's Privy Councillors, did me the very same kindness; and thus the old ballad seems to have a claim to be given a place in these reminiscences, for the sake of other of our contemporaries who may share our sentiment about it.

"'Twas a beautiful night, and the stars shone bright,
And the moon on the waters play'd,
When a gay cavalier to a bower drew near
A lady to serenade.
To tenderest words he swept the chords,
And many a sigh breath'd he.
While o'er and o'er he fondly swore:
Sweet maid, I love but thee."

With a lingering lilt at the end:

"Sweet mai-aid, sweet mai-aid, I lov-ove, I lov-ove but
thee."
"When he turn'd his eye to the lattice high,
And fondly breath'd his hopes,
In amazement he sees, swing about in the breeze,
All ready, a ladder of ropes.
Up, up, he has gone. The bird she has flown.
'What's this on the ground?' quoth he.
''Tis plain that she loves. Here's some gentleman's gloves,
And they never belong'd to me.
These gloves, these gloves, they never belong'd to me.'
Of course you'd have thought he'd have followed and
fought,
For it was a duelling age;
But the gay cavalier quite scorn'd the idea
Of putting himself in a rage.
So wiser by far, he pack'd up his guitar,
And as homeward he went sang he,
'When a lady elopes down a ladder of ropes
She may go to Hongkong for me.
She may go, she may go, she may go to Hongkong for me.'"

I do not know if it was the same cavalier to the same lady—but I think not, and General G. thinks not—who thus mourned by my infant lips:

"I'll hang my harp on a willow-tree
And go off to the wars again.
A peaceful life has no charms for me,
The battlefield no pain.
For the lady I love will soon be a bride,
With a diadem on her brow,
Oh, had she not flattered my boyish pride
I might have been happy now!"

Or:

"Oh, why did she flatter my boyish pride?
She is going to leave me now!"

Looking through that wide window into the old parlour as it used to be, how plainly I could see the ring of benign or ecstatic faces around the centre table, visitors and grandparents and uncles and aunts gathered to behold and applaud the prodigy! Even the formidable youngest aunt would grant a provisional smile to a display she could not have approved of; because it was really rather notable, I believe, considering my time of life, and even she had her soft moments. Besides, she was then young herself.

When she came to see us at this house—she had not time to come much to any of the others—she made it her business to show our mother how we should be brought up. She must have known something about it, seeing that afterwards she was governess to young royalties at two of the courts of Europe, but we, while compelled to bow to her authority, had no respect for it or for her. Regarding her image dispassionately from this long, long distance, I see that she was an exceptionally correct and accomplished woman, but a certain circumstance that took place behind that parlour window fixed another view of her upon my infant mind too firmly to be obliterated in a lifetime.

I was just old enough to go to church, and my doting mother had provided me with a lovely Sunday bonnet. It covered the whole head closely, in the height of fashion—responsible for many ear-aches, by the way—and it had two little tails of ribbon on one side of it, each end fringed out. When this bonnet was tied on, the pelisse that covered the bareness of the indoor costume being also adjusted, I was as conscious of my striking appearance as the proud parent herself. She still had her own toilet to make, and while she dressed I went down to the hall where the family assembled for the procession to the village church. It was early, and I was first at the rendezvous, so I went into the drawing-room to look at myself. A large mirror that had gilt candelabra branching out on either side, and a fierce gilt eagle on the point of flight from the apex, hung on the wall by the window, with a sort of divan that was also a receptacle for music sheets and other things in front of it. Laboriously I climbed that ottoman and stood as a statue on a pedestal before that convex glass. Then I lost count of time in the contemplation of my charms, and especially of those two fringed ends of ribbon drooping gracefully to my shoulder. My head was screwed round to bring them well into view, when I was suddenly petrified by a vision of the youngest aunt in the doorway. I was caught red-handed, as it were. It was impossible to evade conviction on the charge that I saw levelled at me from her pitiless calm eyes. I stood silent, trembling, wondering what she would do. "She will tell mother," was my first thought. But she did worse. She sought the nearest work-box, she approached me—still standing on the ottoman—with unsheathed scissors in her hand. She lifted one end of fringed ribbon and sliced it off; she lifted the other and served that the same. In two seconds my bonnet in which I now had to go to church (impotently raging and heart-broken) was ruined, and my vice of vanity supposed to have been destroyed at its source. I cannot recall the effect of the transaction upon my mother's mind, but I know that its effect on mine was not what the youngest aunt anticipated. "Some day you will thank me for it," said she. It was a formula of hers. She was quite wrong. In half-a-century I have not learned to thank her for it. She did not kill vanity with those scissors, as she supposed, but love. It is a mistake common to educationalists the world over.

The eldest aunt, my godmother—she of the Marble Arch episode—was quite a different sort of person. She too, being also a single woman, thought she could improve upon her married sister's methods of managing children, but her pills were so sugared that it was a pleasure to swallow them; at any rate, it was so here at T——, before young men, or even boys, could trouble her. One instance of a lesson prepared and administered for my good, when I was still little more than a baby, stands out very distinctly.

I had a passion for dolls. It was the first passion of my life, and lasted until I was so old as to be ashamed to be seen with them. The first of my family were just any articles that came to hand, but soon we had a nurse (the first five of us being born in six years, our mother was not always able to attend to everything, as she desired), who gave shape and form, of a sort, to my maternal ideals. She stuffed bags with chaff or sawdust and sewed them together, a round ball to a larger round ball, and four sausage-shaped ones to that. This body had the surpassing merit of bigness; clothed in a real child's cast-off clothes, it seemed itself more real. When nurse had done her part I used to carry it downstairs to father for him to put a face and hair on it with pen and ink. Although I always pleaded with him to make her as pretty as possible, the spirit of mischief sometimes prompted him to draw the countenance of a goblin or an idiot. I would open my arms to embrace a lovely baby girl and find a horrible monster with cross eyes and grinning teeth; at which I would at once break into a wail and a flood of tears. Then he would be very sorry, would hasten to somebody for a fresh layer of calico and sit down and make the face again—this time his very best (and he was a clever draughtsman) with which I would be quite satisfied. The breed of dolls improved, of course, with my own development in taste and knowledge; the rag doll gave place to the wooden Dutch creature with the pegged joints and shiny black head, and that to the waxen angel with floss-silk hair and smiling carmine lips, eyes like the sky and cheeks like the rose, which seemed almost too good and beautiful for this world. Indeed that was too often the view taken of her by the authorities. Wrapped in silver paper she would repose in a drawer in the spare room under lock and key, while I pined for her companionship, and would only be granted to me as a sort of distinguished visitor on high days and holidays.

Well, the eldest aunt never came to see us without bringing presents. As soon as it was known upstairs that she had arrived we were thrown into a fever of greedy anticipation, wondering what they would be this time. I can remember the scene of her entrance into the nursery on two or three occasions, each time in the evening in her indoor costume, after she had kept us waiting for some time. She carried her gifts in her arms. But one day instead of coming to the nursery she sent for us to her room. I, the eldest niece, was summoned first, and after greetings she took from her box a ravishing wax doll and laid it in my arms.

"There," said she, "that is for a good girl."

Naturally I assumed it mine. I sat down and nursed it and gloated over it, while she smiled benignly on me. Then, while at the dizziest summit of my joy, I was informed that the doll was not for me but for my next sister. Little did I guess what hung upon my behaviour under this sore trial! As little can I account for the luck—merit it could not have been—which led me to take the blow submissively. I handed back the doll with a sigh, perhaps a tear, but without a murmur. Straightway another doll, twice as big and fine, was extracted from the aunt's box and pronounced to be irrevocably my own—because I had not shown myself selfish under a temptation carefully calculated to test my character in that respect. The eldest aunt explained her moral lesson with the result of which she was so proud—as I was. She made me understand that the smaller doll would have remained mine had I grudged it to my sister, who would then have received the big one. As with the lesson of the youngest aunt (who would have given neither doll to one so undeserving as, by the merest accident, I might have shown myself), it impressed itself indelibly on my mind—the profitableness of virtue to oneself, and never mind what it costs other people. It would have made an excellent text for one of the children's story-books of the period.

Compared with these disciplinarians my dear mother was nowhere. She could hardly bring herself to scold a child. As far as I was concerned my father was the same. His weak indulgence of me, the open favouritism with which he distinguished me from my brothers and sisters was—I know now—scandalous. Harsh to his boys, and too ready to box the ears of the little girls when they were old enough, he never laid an angry finger on me. One punishment only was mine, and I must have been bad indeed at the times when it was inflicted; I was sent to sit on the stairs. That does not sound like punishment at all, but the treadmill was not dreaded more by those condemned to it. To sit on the stairs meant to sit on the bottom step of the front stairs, just facing the hall door, in dread expectation of a visitor who should be witness of the unspeakable ignominy of my position—akin to that of one exposed in the village stocks to the insults of a hostile populace. I could not look at that front door, that I used to watch in such agonies of fear, without seeing behind it the huddled little figure, quaking in terror of the caller who hardly ever came.

If I was let off so lightly myself, I suffered horribly in the punishments of my nursery companions, particularly in the case of my one-year-older brother—a thoughtful, gifted, sensitive boy, with a fragile body and a spirit that could not be bent or intimidated, who, from his babyhood until he came to his deathbed at seventeen, was in constant collision with a passionate father who had not the capacity to understand him. I remember once beating out with a poker the panels of a door behind which he sat in darkness, a prisoner on bread and water, proud and silent, with a bleeding back but a dry eye, that I might get to him to weep over him and comfort him. It makes me feel wicked, even now, to think of it. And to think of his poor, delicate, devoted mother, who did understand him, and to whom he was so precious, more helpless than I to prevent or mitigate these tragic blunders, makes my own mother-blood run cold.

In the generations before my own it seems to have been incumbent on a father who would do his duty to be cruel to his sons (and how hard the tradition dies!); it was incumbent on a mother to be stern and distant with her young daughters, if she could—and there is ample evidence that she forced herself to it. What the conception of parental duty now is we know. Thinking the matter over, it seems to me that the happy mean between the two extremes may have been struck somewhere about the time when I was a child myself. I am not citing my own experiences in proof of this—far from it—but the broad general rules that applied to all respectable households of the period.

The iron hand had taken on the velvet glove. Discipline—still a synonym for decency, for civilisation, for religion, in the average parent's mind—was enforced, not pitilessly, as aforetime, but with firmness, and as a rule in moderate and reasonable ways. The child, even the spoilt child, remained completely subject to its natural rulers, whose sense of responsibility for its well-being seemed never out of their minds; but while "duty" was still the watchword—and the word stood for a real thing—the weakness of the weak side was more justly allowed for—not pandered to, you understand; only not treated as a crime to be cured by punishment. Duty—duty—how one loathed the word! But how good for character to be trained to recognise the thing! The very infant, if able to employ itself usefully, had a daily task of some kind—was taught that life was meant for work, and that play was unlawful save as a reward for work. Even at T—— it was my duty, and I knew it, to spend certain hours with a long seam or hem, stabbing my finger, weeping over repeated unpickings and admonishments, just as it was my duty to make a joyless breakfast of bread and milk. Every little girl must know how to manufacture, single-handed, a whole shirt for her father—and the amount of fine sewing in a whole shirt of those days must now be seen to be believed—or hide her head amongst her peers and cause her mother to be ashamed of her. I was well on the way with this laborious undertaking before I could read.

Utter drudgery it was, because the scheme of "plain-work" was too vast, and its details too minute and complicated, for my understanding, but it did not destroy my inherited love of the needle. When it ceased to be an instrument of discipline, it became my favourite toy. I could be kept "good" at any time with beads to thread, or some wools and a bit of canvas for a kettle-holder, or, above all, scraps with which to dress dolls. What girl-child makes dolls' clothes—proper dolls' clothes—now? In my child days it was an occupation as constant as it was delightful. All the year round I was stocking a little trunk with elaborate costumes for my children, against they went with me a-visiting, or in the family party to the seaside. It was thus that I learned to be independent of dressmakers for myself in later years. A particularly bright memory of my life at T—— is the way I "spent the day"—a regular-recurring holiday—at a neighbouring farmhouse. My hostesses kept a doll for me. I never took it home—it lived in a drawer in their spare bedroom—but it was brought out as soon as I arrived, together with such odds and ends of material as were available at the moment; and down I sat to reclothe the puppet anew, in a costume of fresh design, the completion of which would synchronise with the call of parent or nurse to fetch me home. Now, when a houseful of grown-ups has a child to entertain for many hours at a stretch, what labour and strain to keep it amused and happy! These people had only to give me a doll, a rag or two, and sewing materials, and I was amused for the whole day, and so happy that I have never forgotten how happy I was.

On account of that doll—which, after all, was not more than six inches long—I had been most anxious to see the house belonging to it. I knew it had been near T——, and, as I remembered it, almost unique in rustic charm. Often, amid the lightly run up homes of Australia, I had thought of its solid, old-world, if humble, beauty, and on this particular afternoon I had purposed to feast my artistic sense upon it with a satisfaction unknown to me when I was young and ignorant. It was quite a shock—so accustomed had I become to finding all I looked for—to discover that it was no more; the one thing gone, of which no trace at all remained. Its garden was wholly obliterated, and on the site of the old house stood a new house, the commonest of the common, from which I turned in disappointment and disgust. Dear, dear old vanished home! I could not have believed I should feel its loss so much.

But I can say of it, in the words of the obituary column, that, although gone, it is not forgotten. In my gallery of Memory the picture of it hangs, no line or tint bedimmed by the passage of the years.

Behold it with me, my reader. In the foreground an oval lawn, carefully kept (for I was frequently employed to weed the daisies out): it is ringed with gravelled path, then squared box borders, then flower-beds, behind which on one side rises a thick belt of fir-trees, and on the other lie the farmyards, over a dividing wall. From the little green gate in the roadway fence (lined with a clipped hedge) one views the old dwelling at the top of the lawn; long and low, its walls a mat of ivy, pierced with latticed casements, opening outward, and a front door under a little porch; a large, steep, thatched roof, with dormer windows to the row of four bedrooms, and old ornamental chimneys in clusters, tall and fat. On the side of the trees, wooden lattices in the ivy let sunless light into the dairy (robber rats used to squeeze through the interstices and get caught fast on their return), and the finest violets and primroses grow underneath. Also, farther into the green shade, pet hedgehogs live that a little girl feeds with milk, and that uncurl and scuffle along at her heels through the pine-needles to show their cupboard love. And along that side the bees feed from the foxgloves, in the bells of which little boys entrap them, to chase the little girl with the buzzing prisoners, helpless in their silken bags. The backyard, unseen, has red-brick pathways through it, ringing with the clink of pattens and milk-pails; one leads to a green door, portal of a paradise of unforbidden fruit; another branches off to the gate of nearest access to the deeply mired cowyard, which is also the pigyard and poultry-yard—which, by the way, should suggest an effluvium to be remembered, but does not, possibly because the windows of the period were used, not to let air in, but to keep it out. Sweet old house—altogether sweet, smelling only of lavender and cabbage roses and pot-pourri and fragrant cookings....

The title of the picture is "The House of the Doll."

For the doll's sake, Mrs H., its mistress, and H.M. (the two Christian names never dissociated), her daughter, stand out from the shadowy crowd of my earliest acquaintances in high relief. So small a society as we were in our village and adjacent hamlets—miles and miles from any railway—we had, of course, our cliques. Some of the half-dozen or so of farmers' families were not to be familiarly recognised on any account; with two or three we were distantly fraternal, confining our amenities to cake-and-wine calls; one or two were on such a footing with us that we "dropped in" on each other at uncanonical hours, and conducted intercourse in our "keeping" rooms and in our ordinary attire, but still with the perfect understanding that the precise etiquette of the time forbade the dearest friend to stay to meals unless previously invited and prepared for; excepting, of course, in crises of trouble, when etiquette must ever give way to primitive impulse. The H. family were amongst these intimates, and chief of them all to me on account of that doll.

There was a Mr H., but he was a nonentity in his domestic circle, a slow, fat, white old man, with a large pimple on his nose, and whom his wife addressed and referred to by his surname only; from all that I can remember, it seems plain that she (a notable person amongst us, vigorous, dressy, authoritative, I should say a perfect exponent of the "proper" in her class) held the purse-strings. I know that she left home at stated intervals to "collect her rents"—not his. There was also H., the bushy-whiskered, towny son, apple of his mother's eye—the same H. who married cousin E.—but he was not much at his home when I was going there to dress my doll. When he was, he illustrated the awkwardness of the architectural plan of that and many of the old houses of the time. The row of upper chambers, whose dormer windows poked out of the thatched roof, opened one into the other; Mrs H. and her spouse had command of the staircase, but H.M. had to go through their room to hers, and H. through both to his; beyond his lay the spare bedroom, which had a little newel staircase, no wider than the doors that masked it, in one corner, going down to the corresponding corner of what was superfluously styled the "spare" parlour; but these two stately and sacred rooms were not meant to be made a passage of, and as such no one thought of using them. So H. came and went by way of his mother's and sister's rooms, and when I spent the night with them (sleeping with H. M.) the excitement of his appearances was a great part of the entertainment. H.M.'s favourite ejaculation, "Lawk-a-daisy-me!" signalled his approach; if she was in bed she threw the sheet over her head, if she was up she hid in a closet. She never seemed to get over the novelty of the thing, which must have been going on since she was born. And, although she was probably a young woman, she seemed quite old to me.

Poor H.H.! How history repeats, and also anticipates, itself! Too elegant for a farmer, and so a corn-merchant, with a desk in the Exchange at L——, it was quite a condescension on his part to make a sojourn under the paternal roof; and his mother seemed to glory in the fact. He was the fine gentleman of the village, bringing the latest thing in trouser-cut and hat-brim to the rustic youth. How appropriate his ideals to his end!

Dress, I may remark by the way, although so far less complicated and costly than it now is, was an equally important matter to us all. Red-letter days were those on which we met our intimate acquaintances, at each house in turn, to inspect the new attire procured twice a year from L——. All the ladies seemed to set themselves up at once, possibly because fixed days were observed for bringing out their finery, Easter Sunday being one, but also they may have wished to avoid the appearance of copying or forestalling each other. I know there was a great comparing of notes at the various private views, and ejaculations of admiration signifying polite surprise. A new dress per season was then a thing unheard of, but a new bonnet, or, more often, one that had been cleaned and retrimmed, was forthcoming for every female head. I can see those bonnets now, with their flowered caps in front and their flouncy curtains behind, and their strings that used to be rolled up and pinned in paper when not spread in bow and ends upon the wearers' breasts. I think Mrs H. and her daughter must have been our great exemplars in the matter of dress, so numerous seemed the mantles and fal-lals in addition to the bonnets of their bi-annual show, and such an impression of their rustling magnificence on Sundays remains with me.

[CHAPTER VII]

OLD TIMES AND NEW

It struck me, as I stood up in Mr B.'s carriage to look at the old house which had so well survived the changes and chances of half-a-century, that at the beginning of that half-century the cash cost of happiness was very much lighter than it is at the end; and not the cash cost of happiness only, but of material well-being, domestic plenty, social position, everything necessary to the comfort and dignity of a gentleman. I do not speak of the poor labouring class; I do not say—I do not for a moment think—that the old times on the whole were better than the new; but I believe they were better in a few things, and amongst other things in this—the good taste of people in the matter of money.

Five hundred a year was then a good income. The fortunate possessor did not usually thirst for more. He could keep a large, substantial house amply provided, and take his family for an outing yearly, and still save something. He had not fifty thousand trivial drains upon his purse, as we have, consuming our substance we know not how; he saw his return for what he spent, and he knew what he wanted, and it was not much. His good home, his county town, his local meet of hounds—they were not necessarily duller than the crush of interests in our more fevered world. He grew his own fruit and vegetables, if not his own pork and butter. Housekeeping was thrifty, as a matter of duty, apart from any thought of saving. I knew an earl who took a lump of meat out of a pig-tub and ordered it to be washed and cooked for his dinner, by way of pointing a moral to wasteful kitchenmaids. Out of five hundred pounds a year, the wife would ask, perhaps, twenty pounds as her personal allowance. Her clothes were always good, with rarely a button or a darn wanting, but they were made at home or in the National School—fine linen under-garments (with, of course, silk stockings) and white calico petticoats, seamed and tucked exquisitely, but not "enriched" with miles of lace, as in our own costly fashion. She wore aprons to protect her neat gowns—a black silk ornamental apron in the afternoon. Her best silk dress was best for a dozen years, the Paisley shawl of her marriage outfit never out of fashion. The local dressmaker came to sew for the children—eighteenpence a day and her meals; she remade the same frock twice or thrice: turning it on the first occasion, putting it together after washing on the second, cutting it down for a younger child on the third; and everything was lined throughout, to enhance the durability of those everlasting stuffs. Girls went to balls in white book-muslin and a pink or blue sash; the whole costume, with shoes and gloves, might have cost a pound; yet we were supposed to be well dressed—we really were, according to the modest requirements of the time. So that it is easy to understand why the possessor of five hundred pounds a year not only felt himself passing rich, but actually was so. A farmer—a "gentleman-farmer," as he was called, the class to which we belonged—with half that income clear of farm expenses, was in a position to envy no man. I fancy that was something like my father's situation when we were at T——. But he was constitutionally incapable of managing money—he could not hold it—and it is mother I think of when I think how ample and orderly that old home was. The housewife of those days—so humbly inferior to her lord and master as she was content to consider herself, although he might not be worthy to tie her shoes (to adjust her sandals, rather)—she was the home-maker, the heroine of her day, although nobody knew it, herself least of all. Certainly she had the advantage over her descendants of those good old contented servants which are never heard of nowadays, because the feudal age is past; they were the foundation-stones of the domestic edifice, which for lack of them is now unsettled, decaying, in some sort out of date. But apart altogether from consideration of such conditions as were of the times and not of her individual choice, did she not know her business well? I ask you, dear friends, who were young with me.

Her grand-daughters laugh at her little fads and nostrums, but they had their value and meaning to her and us. I have known of a modern lady, a collector of curios, getting hold of that, to her, amusing article, a copper warming-pan. Having been so lucky as to get hold of it, she hung it up on a wall by a ribbon round its handle, for an ornament. The housewife of the fifties did know better than that. She raked red coals into it, poked it between the sheets at the bottom of a bed, and in a few minutes made that bed the cosiest, the blissfullest, the most sleep-compelling nest to tuck an ailing child into on a winter's night that was ever contrived by human intelligence in any generation. I would like once more to hear that smothered rattle up and down, to smell that delicious scorchy odour of the warmed sheets, to feel that sensation of transcendent comfort as I sank to rest; but, of course, I never shall. Now, when I fear to be kept awake with the shivers of a raw night, I fall back on a hot-water bottle or a brick baked in the kitchen oven. The magic warming-pan, where still extant, hangs cold and useless on the wall. The present generation does not know its value; no, not even in chilly England, where I found so many unexpected survivals of things I had supposed for ages out of date. It seems to me—not always, of course, nor even often, but now and then—that the homes of my childhood were more really comfortable than the corresponding homes of to-day. That there was real comfort in them, and that at a price far less than we pay for our comfort, is, at any rate, indisputable.

Deadly dull they would be to us to-day, I know. I saw something of the life, about the eastern counties, in several families that had brought it down unchanged to the twentieth century, and I asked myself, "How could I stand this now?" I could not stand it, with all my love of peace and quiet, of which I have never been able to get enough. It would drive me melancholy mad. But in the days to which these self-contained and unawakened homes belong, it was not dull. Was it, reader? To the best of my recollection, we did not know what boredom meant.

The procession of the hours passed before my eyes when I looked at my old home—one day so like another that I could not lose myself amongst them.

No morning tea, of course. I blush to add, no bath. I do not remember a bathroom in any house—not even that of my maternal grandfather, a physician of some distinction in his day, who dictated the laws of hygiene not only to us but to many county families. A portable bath was part of the furniture of every decent house—we had one so large that the frequent monthly nurse made her bed in it—but, like the warming-pan, it was not for common use; it was a medical appliance chiefly. Such is the case, I find, in many English houses still. We children were severely scrubbed and scoured in washing-tubs every Saturday night—"tub night"—and we did a great deal of sea bathing in summer; between whiles we ran constant risk of being sent from table to obliterate the line of demarcation between the washed and unwashed portions of face and neck. Dirty little pigs! We used to dress first, and then seek the sparing sponge. This was after the nurse of infancy had been replaced by the nursery governess, who, to the best of my recollection, was no more particular herself.

There was some excuse for us in those bitter English winters. To go warm from the "keeping-room" fire to the ice-cold linen sheets was bad enough—I recall the nightly struggle for courage to put feet down into them; to have to get out again into a temperature that froze the towels on the horse so that they would stand up by themselves like boards—that froze one's breath on the sheets so that I have scratched my face on the crystals as on pins—was a sharper ordeal. Small wonder that we hurried into our clothes, or that the stiff, blue, chilblained fingers shrank from wet on the top of cold. I remember a winter night when my ewer split in halves with a loud report, and the water within rolled out upon the floor like a lump of glass; there had been a fire in the room overnight too, a luxury dispensed with, as a rule, in the case of children who had passed out of the nursery into rooms of their own. It was in the same winter that I inadvertently touched an iron railing with my bare hand, and skin and metal stuck together. This, however, was not at T——.

My doctor-grandfather did not pull-to the curtains round his and grandmother's bed. I know, because I used to sleep in their room when visiting them by myself, and gaze upon them from my cot in the corner as they slept—both in nightcaps, hers deeply frilled over the face, his cone-shaped, with the tasselled point hanging over one ear. But it was the the rule to draw them—that is what they were there for—and my father and mother did so. The room itself was made airtight first. To have slept with a window open would have seemed to them the act of a deliberate suicide. Curtains having been drawn over bolted windows, six more (of flowered damask, very thick) were drawn round the canopied four-poster, turning it into a small tent; a pleated valance round the top obviated the danger of ventilation where the rings ran upon the rods. The occupants entered the enclosure by an aperture on either side, closed it carefully, sank into the yielding depths of the billowy feather-bed, and slept like tops. At any rate, I never heard that they did not. More than that, there are people who can sleep under almost the same conditions still. I had had an idea that feather-beds had been extinct for thirty years, at least, but last year I reposed on no less than four separate ones in four separate houses; yes, and slept well upon them all. I got so used to feather-beds at last that on my return home I had to send my hair mattress to be teased before I could reconcile myself to it again. Almost everywhere I went in England I used to go up to bed to find the windows of my room closed and locked under the drawn blinds—part of the housemaid's preparations for the night; whereas I am accustomed to sleep with three wide open, and to wish that roof and walls could be dispensed with. Although I adjusted myself so easily to the feather-bed, I drew the line at the shut-up room; the fresh night air was indispensable. But I would sometimes find the bedclothes damp in the morning, and the clothes I had taken off too clammy to put on again. I had forgotten that peculiarity of English nights.

My mother, when I knew her first, did her hair of a morning in two parts; the hinder half was brushed back, tied tightly, and disposed in braids around a high comb; the front drooped in beautiful golden ringlets on either side of her face. But when she was thirty or so she dressed like the sedate old lady that we took her then to be. She tucked her fair hair under a cap—a large cap, with streamers of ribbon hanging down from below the ears like untied bonnet-strings. There was a dummy head of pasteboard (which went by the name of Jane Winter), with a proper face to it, and a hollow neck with an opening within which to stow away materials, on which her caps were made. It may possibly have been because she was perennially convalescing from confinements that she wore caps as a habit at so early an age, but I think not; I believe them to have been the sign of departed youth. When you became a mother, though you might be still in your teens, a large cap was part of the "sitting-up" costume. I remember standing at mother's side by open drawers, while Cousin E., "expecting" for the first and last time, displayed the elaborate preparations made for her infant and herself. I did not know what they meant, but I see now the white cap of blond lace and gauze ribbon that she twirled about on her doubled fist. I saw her in it too on the happy day when I was first allowed to sit on a stool at her feet and nurse the baby. She looked beautiful in it, with her girlish face and mass of dark hair. On emerging from invalid retirement she left it off, so I suppose it was a sort of glorified substitute for the universal nightcap.

With regard to other clothing, all persons claiming to be gentlefolk—the division of classes was strongly marked in those days—wore Irish linen shifts and shirts and silk stockings; no matter how poor nor how outwardly shabby they went, they must conform in those particulars or lose caste. My two grandmothers, both wealthier than we were, were sticklers for the finest material, and some of their silk stockings (white, like all stockings) and exquisite under-garments came down to their descendants to be darned and darned as long as they would hold together. When they were worn out—no cotton; a lady would live on bread and water sooner than come to that. Much of this linen nether-wear was made in the National Schools, where sewing was an important feature in the education of the poor. The ladies of the neighbourhood gave their material and instructions, and from time to time inspected the process of manufacture. Often have I accompanied a village patroness on this errand, stood shyly by while she studied the fine stitching—one thread drawn and the tiny beading done on the crossing threads, two backward and two forward—and the tiny gathers "stroked" to a regularity that no machine could better, the little craftswomen dropping their dutiful curtsies to her when she deigned to commend their work. I do not know who was paid for it when it was done.

Winter and summer these linen garments were, I believe, worn next the skin. I forget what the fashion of the early fifties decreed to be worn immediately over them, except stays that had busks of solid wood, and had to be laced down the back every time they were put on. But I remember watching, in that room up yonder, my mother tying her bustle round her waist. It was a stuffed roll like a sand-bag, reaching from hip to hip, designed to set her skirts out behind; and the skirts hanging under and over it were numerous and full. As for gowns—the deep point in front, the patterned flounces, bell sleeves combined with white muslin bishop sleeves, large lace collars fastened under a spreading ribbon bow or cameo brooch the size of a small plate, "habit-shirts" (for filling in the long and narrow V of an open-fronted bodice)—memory supplies but a jumble of these things. It does not matter. History has preserved the modes of the time, and I presume we kept up with them as well as country-folk could do.

In the nursery our clothes were more defined in style. Though snow lay on the ground, we went bare-armed and bare-necked—down to the latest baby, whose little sleeves would be tied up with ribbons at the shoulders. To put long sleeves to a child's frock was a thing unheard of; they were given to us with the first "gown," which, with its lengthened skirt and fastenings in front, signified the estate of womanhood. Sandalled shoes, very thin in the sole, were correct indoor wear. The other end of me was showered over with tubular ringlets hanging nearly to my waist. The painful process of preparing them—the relentless thoroughness with which our nurse (mother was gentler) rolled up a strand of hair a few inches, "chucked" it tight upon its rag, rolled it a little more and chucked it again, and finally tied it close to the stretched scalp, with odd hairs dragging at their too tenacious roots, continuing the torture for half-an-hour or more—this was one of the sorrows of childhood in the fifties, and no small one either. Our nursery toilet was completed by the "feeder" tied on before each meal and removed after. We went downstairs—when mother was "about"—to the row of bread-and-milk basins that I, for one, hated the sight of, except in the season when a sprinkle of strawberries or raspberries and a little sugar were dropped into them; the youngest aunt being unaware of such a weak relaxation of rules. Discipline imposed that bread-and-milk upon us every day of our lives, no matter how we rebelled against it. We might be bribed to get it down by promises of a taste of the adults' dishes afterwards—the fat gravy from the bacon was a valued perquisite; but there was no dispensing with the nauseous preliminary. I have not been able to eat bread-and-milk since.

Mother came downstairs with her key-basket. What she did with all those keys I do not know, but they were evidently precious. She carried them, with the plate-basket, to her room, nightly; a maid retrieved the latter when she took up father's shaving water, but the little brown basket of keys was never beyond reach of the mistress's hand. She set it down beside the tea-tray while she administered breakfast. And I had not been three days in England before I saw the exact duplicate of that little brown basket, with all the keys in it, go through exactly the same performance. How oddly it struck me. For in Australia we know not key-baskets—never have done so far as I know. If you were to lock sideboard or store-closet against your respectable maids in this country they would not stay with you. And I should not blame them.

I suppose mother's tea-caddy was locked—certainly tea was a terrible price those days. I often opened the lid of the quaint box, which had two lidded receptacles inside, one for black tea, one for green, and a special caddy spoon to ladle it out with. She made the tea herself from a blending of the two kinds, to which she added a dust of carbonate of soda, apparently to increase the look of strength. She drew the water from the hissing urn, kept at the boil by a red-hot metal core slipped into a cylinder in the middle of it. She and father, like many others, drank the decoction pure, without sugar or milk.

After breakfast he went to his farm work; she also—and she was the better farmer of the two, although he was bred to the trade and she was not. His soul was in the hunting-field and the lighter distractions of his life, and money slid through his pockets as water through a sieve; it was she, from first to last, who kept things together as best she could. She had had the sheltered and dainty girlhood of the well-born and well-to-do, who had such (to us, and especially to us who are British colonists) strange ideas of the privileges and immunities of their class; needless to say she had never done "work," in the real sense of the word, for that was the portion of the "common people." But now she sent fowls and eggs to market; and butter of her own manufacture—butter in large quantities, as I remember, for I used to sit on a high chair in the dairy with her and watch her make it. She always made a special pat for me, with no salt in it; which is how I like butter to this day. I could see again, as I looked along the side of the old house, that cool dairy, with the shelf of crockery pans all round it and the big churn in the middle, on the red-flagged floor; I leaned again on the edge of the table where she worked under my studious eye, her white arms bare to above the elbow, the dim green light on her lily-fair face—light filtered through a wooden lattice and the shadows of an elderberry-tree, from the fruit of which was made yearly many a stone jarful of strong wine, for mulling with sugar and spices to warm us for bed o' winter nights and before going to an unheated church on winter Sunday mornings.

Besides elderberry wine mother made gooseberry wine, currant wine, ginger wine, cowslip wine—all manner of wines; the cellar was kept stocked with a large variety, costing next to nothing. She used them where the modern hostess uses tea in the entertainment of company. Afternoon callers had cake and wine offered to them, and the careful wife of a wasteful husband did not squander the port and sherry. They were for the solemn dinners—to swim upon a shining mahogany sea in the best decanters, set in baize-bottomed boats of pierced silver—and for Christmas and other festivals. There was always a "best" of everything—glass, china, silver, napery—sacred to state occasions.

Every year also she brewed beer in the brew-house, barrels of it, for the supply of the field labourers (to whom it was given at eleven A.M. to wash down their luncheon of bread and pork), as well as for household use. Her cordials, her jams and jellies, her pickles of all sorts, her mushroom "ketchup," her raspberry vinegar and cherry brandy, her bottles of capers (the seeds of nasturtiums), her jars of garnered honey, her ropes of onions, her carefully cured hams and bacons, hanging thickly from the beams of the timbered kitchen ceiling—punctually were all these things stocked in their season, excellently prepared, by her own hands, when illness did not compel her to use a deputy. She and the other village ladies were rival cooks. Each had her special family recipes, and they took pride in comparing them.

Baking day occurred twice a week. Then was the great oven in the wall filled with blazing faggots, and the kitchen tables with the dough of bread and pastry and the batter of cakes; anon the smouldering ashes were raked out, and the long-handled flat shovel fed loaves and meat pies and sweet confectionery into the warm-breathing cavern; presently the house was odorous with appetising scents, and the pantry was stocked for the time being. Amongst the delicacies would be a little cake of my own making. I would spend the morning over that bit of material, brought to the colour of a slate pencil, while mother manipulated the rest, going and coming, flushed and busy, but loving to keep me by her, to prattle to her while she worked. It seems to me that I must have been her constant companion before the governesses came.

The joint for dinner was not baked—never. It was hung by a "jack" over a dripping-pan before the square red fire, which roasted it crisp and brown as the machine slowly turned it round and round. Sometimes the machine went wrong (it wound up like a clock), and sometimes a coal would fall into the pan and make the gravy gritty, but, on the whole, I fancy that way of cooking meat has not been much improved upon. The outside fat seemed to take on layers of richness with every spoonful of fire-cleared dripping poured over it. The gravy that was the residue of this had a surpassing quality, particularly when upheaved upon the bosom of a puffy-edged Yorkshire pudding, or when mingled with the cream that hares were basted with. Unsoddened and undiluted by the steam of the ovens, the whole goodness was preserved to flesh and juice. Unless it is that distance lends enchantment to this roast of old.

The Yorkshire pudding or the roast gravy with some other plain pudding—boiled batter or Norfolk dumplings—made the first course of the midday dinner (as it does still in some conservative families), and the midday dinner was moved on to three o'clock for company and on state occasions. The meat and vegetables made the second course; after these the sweets and cheese (home-made), as now, with dessert only on Sundays and holidays. A jug of brown ale, drawn from a barrel perennially on tap, would grace the table, which had no decoration of flowers, but relied for distinction upon the quality of its napery and silver. We dined with our parents mostly, and were not oppressively treated in respect of good things, unless the youngest aunt was present.

After dinner father took his arm-chair and his long-stemmed churchwarden, mother her indefatigable needle. Or perhaps she and I would walk out together to call upon our neighbours—those who received us in the keeping-room (aptly named), where we could enjoy the informal intercourse that was in character with the place, or those who invited us to the parlour, the primness, comfortlessness, reserve and artificiality of which were reflected in our demeanour, as in that of the lady of the house. When Mrs H. was summoned without notice to interview a caller here, she kept that caller waiting while she changed her gown, put on her best cap, got out her best decanters and silver cake-basket; her daughter similarly revised her costume before she allowed herself to be seen, although they always "dressed" for midday dinner and the afternoon, after their kitchen and farm work of the morning. But when we appeared unexpectedly, Mrs H.'s up-thrown hands and H.M.'s "Lawk-a-daisy-me!" would express not consternation but ready welcome; and in that dear old keeping-room, with its beamed ceiling almost on our heads, we were friends and not company, and could open hearts and mouths as freely as we liked. That is, the grown-ups could—not I. "Little girls must be seen and not heard," was the admonition addressed to me when I attempted to join in the conversation. My part was to listen, which I did so well that I could almost fill a book with the interesting family secrets and village scandals unconsciously confided to my retentive child's memory.

There was a lady spoken of who went to bed when her baby was dying, and who, on rising in the morning, showed disappointment that it was not dead, and resentment towards the Good Samaritan (H.M. herself) who had sat up with it all night, and whose skill had pulled it through. There was another lady who, having come into a fortune of thousands, had wept because a hundred or two belonging to it had been left to someone else, the reason of those tears being that the odd money would have enabled the weeper to refurnish her house without breaking into the rounded bulk of the big legacy. There was yet another, a devoted whist-player, who had been caught by some extraordinarily smart person in the practice of an ingenious swindle. She would say to her husband, clearly her partner in guilt as in the game, although somehow he escaped censure: "Dear, it is your turn," or: "How warm the room is!" or: "Come, go on," or "See what the time is "—i.e. drop some seeming innocent remark beginning with a certain letter, according as she wanted him to lead diamonds, hearts, clubs or spades. This was evidently regarded as a most horrifying tale, and I could not see why—for a long time. Nor was it easy to fathom the significance of that one about the governess and tutor, who were expelled together from a great house in the neighbourhood, because they had been discovered love-making when they should have been attending to their duties. The warning about "little pitchers"—dropped, it was fondly supposed, unnoticed by me—would now and then spoil the dénouement of a story; but there were dozens and dozens that came to me complete, to be understood in later years, if not at the time. On our way home from these casual symposia I would question mother upon points that puzzled me. Often she would say: "Never mind," or: "You would not understand"; but more often she gave me the information I wanted. She excused herself for this unfashionable weakness in a mother of the period by explaining (the plea for all indulgence) that I was "different from other children."

Five-o'clock tea was not afternoon tea. It was the family evening meal. Ham, brawn (we called it pork-cheese), or some fancy meat, cold, and laid out in slices on a plate, was there for sandwiching between bread and butter similarly prepared; or the savoury might be shrimps or crab, or radishes or cress; jams of great variety, and particularly cakes, filled the rest of the table space that was not occupied by the tea-tray, crowned with its hissing urn. And for this meal no white cloth was used; nor do I remember such a thing as a finger-napkin at any meal. It seemed to be the adjunct of the finger-glass, which we did not aspire to.

Tea was made as at breakfast, but not for us; we had ours in the nursery, of bread-and-treacle or bread-and-dripping, and our mugs held milk and water—except only on such great occasions as Christmas days and birthdays, when we were allowed what we called "gunpowder tea," which was our milk-and-water sugared and slightly coloured with a few spoonfuls from the grown-ups' teapot. In winter a pair of tallow candles illuminated the scene. The grandparents used wax candles—one grandfather used four at a time, and six for company, in six big silver candlesticks—but ours were usually made, like so much else that other people bought at shops, by mother's ingenious hands. Snuffers accompanied them. Some that I have seen were such works of art as well as curiosities that I wonder I have not heard of them amongst the hoards of bric-à-brac collectors. We possessed one beautiful pair in chased and pierced silver, the box patterned like a watch-case; and another of the same metal, finely worked, which had a spring inside the little door that snuffed the black wick into the receiver; and the trays of both matched in style and workmanship. I do not know what became of them—thrown away, probably, as antiquated rubbish, when oil lamps came in.

It was by the light of a tallow candle that mother did the exquisite needlework that nobody can do now, in these effulgent evenings. You almost need a microscope to see the stitches of her fairy-like baby-clothes. Father read his paper quite comfortably by the same dim flame. And people wore spectacles in old age only, and never complained, in my hearing, of ailing or deficient eyes. Why was that?

Although mother, when not needed for social purposes, sewed on until supper-time, my interminable seam was laid aside. I might thread beads or dress dolls or make kettle-holders. Also, the rule that barred story-books, as one would bar cards or dancing, during the serious work hours of the day, was relaxed after tea, and I could batten on "Peter Parley" and The Child's Companion and "The Swiss Family Robinson"—when I was old enough—without incurring the reproach attaching to the dissipated and idle. My earliest fairyland I found in pictures, about which I wove stories of my own. We took a small penny periodical filled with descriptions and illustrations of the contents of the Great Exhibition; this did not much appeal to me, although I remember its woodcuts well. I preferred the lovely Annuals, with their large-eyed and small-mouthed Lady Blessingtons, and the pocket-books, annuals also, which, in addition to their blank pages, contained prize poems and a variety of things, chief amongst them engravings of the country seats of the nobility and gentry. In these palaces and gardens I wandered in fancy, the possessor of them all. But the book I loved most, at the beginning of books, was a handsomely bound collection of tales or sketches, the author of which was (I think) a Mrs Ellis, and the moral—interpreted at a later age—something to do with the temperance question. The letterpress was a blank to me; the steel engravings bound together at the end of the volume I pored over by the hour. One was called "Lady Montfort parting from her Children." She was a beautiful creature in a spacious bare neck and a chaplet of roses, tearing herself wildly from the embraces of a large family trying to hold her back. She was going to have an operation for something, and the doctor was going to perform it with the drunkard's shaking hand and kill her. All I then knew was that she was parting from her children for the last time, and I used to weep over their fate and dream about it. Another picture represented a girl in a high-waisted, pillow-case-like gown and flowered coal-scuttle bonnet (a fashion gone out before I came in), accompanied by another, her maid, similarly but more plainly attired, leaning, from the outside road, over a gate belonging to an ideal parsonage house. I do not know whether drink had caused the late incumbent to die prematurely or to be expelled from his living, but in any case it was responsible for throwing his daughter upon the world. "Looking towards my home and knowing I nevermore should call it mine," was the touching legend inscribed upon the page. I would have given worlds to know how she got on, poor thing. The picture of an after-dinner gentleman being supported out of the dining-room by the butler and footman, and meeting some outraged relative at the door, was too subtly tragic for my understanding.

Children (according to their view) were sent to bed too soon; they always have been, and always will be. But that was not a grievance of mine. As a nursery child, not yet at the stage of learning letters, I practically lived downstairs with my parents—at such times as the youngest aunt was not there to prevent it. Father took me out on horseback about the farm, seated on a pad in front of him within his arms, mother in the gig with her when she went to her old home or shopping to L——; and I believe I could always manage to sit up to supper, if I begged hard and long enough. I was a thoroughly spoilt child. Father's excuse was that I "could not spoil," but I am discounting that fond belief by displaying the spoilt child's base ingratitude—remembering how love carried to extremes indulged my heart's desires, and blaming that love in print! If, while shopping with my mother, I lost my heart to a ducky little parasol (it was of grey watered silk, with white silk lining, deep fringe and a handle jointed in the middle), I would find it next day, springing out on me from some artful ambush, "With Father's Love." For years, on opening the piano for practice, I used to find one spring day the first cucumber of the season, because I was particularly fond of cucumbers. He did not care what it cost, if only he could be the first to treat me. And I purse my lips at their dear shades and shake a reproving head. Still, the fact remains that I sat up of a night when I ought to have been in bed, and even at times when we had "parlour company."

For well I remember the whist tables that entertained our circle on winter evenings, in that room to the left of the hall at T——, and myself sitting at the elbow of one of my parents to watch the mysterious cards and the mutations in the four little piles of coin. It was the rigour of the game, without a doubt—no talk, no levity, but a still and solemn concentration upon the play; and I think I must have been rather a good child, after all, to have been allowed to be there to look on at it.

I remember one other evening pastime of the grown-ups at this period, and my curious participation in it—table-turning. There was an epidemic—probably the first—of enthusiasm for this method of occult research. And round the heavy "centre table," which was a feature of the drawing-rooms of the time, friends gathered to consult the oracle or to deride it, as the case might be. In our house they compromised on an open-minded curiosity tempered with the feeling that "there really must be something in it"—something supernatural, they meant. Interests and credulity were strengthened by my performances at the game. I was supposed to be a mere onlooker, "to be seen and not heard," as usual, but perhaps the chain of hands was not long enough, or perhaps I wanted to join in, and the let-the-little-dear-do-what-she-likes habit of the house admitted me to a place accordingly; at any rate, I one day found myself perched on a book-piled chair in the circle of earnest inquirers round the centre table, my thumbs in contact, the tips of my fourth fingers overlapping the tips of those on either side of me.

Long had the company sat in silent suspense, the solid piece of furniture—round-topped, and supported by a stout pedestal and claw feet resting on mahogany lions' backs—refusing to make a sign; but no sooner was my influence brought to bear upon it than it began to creak and groan, and was presently lumbering like a Wombwell elephant about the room, with us after it, scrambling over stools and other impedimenta to hold fast to it as long as possible. In recording events of so long ago, and particularly a matter of this kind, I wish to make full allowance for unconscious exaggeration; but that the table was declared too heavy to be pushed into such movements, and that I was frequently sent for to start them when older hands failed to do so, are circumstances that seem particularly clear to me.

I suppose, as my fellow-tableturners said at the time, there must have been "something" in me, as well as in "it," if I have rightly described what happened. I mentioned in my "Thirty Years in Australia" a German doctor who in his old age became a spiritualist, and tried hard to persuade me to lend myself to séance purposes, because, he said, I had that in me which marked me out as a medium. Might it possibly have been the same "something" that he divined? Well, I neither know nor care. The little mysteries are all embraced in the big Mystery, which would not be mysterious if we had the power to understand it. I was always that kind of a sceptic which believes in there being a reason for everything. When I was a girl I saw ghosts—unmistakably visible ghosts—and even in their presence, certain that they could not be flesh and blood creatures, and paralysed with horror to know it, I was able to keep this attitude of mind. Since nothing else ailed me that I knew of, I said to myself, "I am going mad"; and I was quite correct in my diagnosis, since what was really happening to me was the beginning of brain fever. I never had or showed the slightest leaning towards or interest in so-called supernatural phenomena. Occult "science" is to me what Mrs Harris was to Betsy Prig. The table-turning craze soon passed, as far as my people were concerned, and I never, even to that extent, dabbled in the black arts again.

The social evening, in those old days, began after the five-o'clock tea and ended with the nine-o'clock supper. This was a great meal, always. The cloth was spread for it as for dinner, and chairs drawn up and carving-knives flourished. The cold joint, with pickles, cold fowl, meat pie, the occasional crab or lobster, the cucumber in its season, any left-over trifles of sweet pastry and creams, cheese—with beer, of course—that was the meal which our forebears found it possible to sleep on, and (which is much more surprising) some of their descendants enjoy without discomfort to this day. In the four houses of the four feather-beds the custom has never been abrogated.

Supper over, and dishes returned to the pantry, the elders at once prepared for bed—to burrow in those mounds of feathers with their heads in nightcaps, and nothing but their own exhausted breath to live on the long night through. Doors and windows—the latter barricaded at nightfall with wooden shutters (hinged and flattened into the wainscoted window-frame by day) drawn over them and fixed with an iron bar across—were severally examined in the most careful manner by whoever was head of the establishment for the time being. Servants might shut the house, but the responsibility of making sure that it was safe for the dark hours was too great to be left to them. I suppose there was some reason for this in the social conditions of the time. Perhaps father's military (yeomanry) accoutrements—which I never saw him wear, but which he was said to have worn, and certainly possessed—had some connection with his actions in preparing his house of a night as if for an expected siege. I know that any suspicious noise occurring after he had done so brought him and his blunderbuss upon the scene in the shortest possible space of time. And that raids did sometimes take place was proved by the sad story of a friend of ours, whose melancholy visage was accounted for by the fact that he had once shot a burglar dead without meaning it. He saw an unlawful hand intruded through a sawn-out gap in his window-shutter, and, calculating that the hand was well above the owner's body, fired at it from within the room. Alas! On the shoulders of him who worked from the ground was an unsuspected second man, and he received the charge in his breast. It was told us of the heart-broken doer of that deed that "he never smiled again."

So, the guard having gone the rounds, the humdrum duties of the day—that never palled—were ended. Master and mistress, bearing key-basket and plate-basket (the plate having been duly counted), trudged upstairs to that bed which was virtually their bedroom also. And slept!

[CHAPTER VIII]

SOME EARLY SUNDAYS

All the Sundays of my childhood came to life again when, driving from T——, we passed the mouth of a grassy by-road, a little way down which stood the church of my earliest worshippings. We were due to drink tea at my grandfather's old home, now occupied by one of his great-grandsons, and had scant time for more lingerings on the way if we were to keep our appointment punctually; but the sight of the familiar square, squat tower was too much for me, and I said to M. and Mr B.: "Oh, I must, I must have just one look!" They drove me into the lane and, scrambling down, I ran up the path through the churchyard, glancing from side to side at the same old tombstones and grassy mounds, numbering baby graves of our own household amongst them, every one with its memories of Sunday loiterers sitting and standing about until all friends had passed and the bells had stopped; and my objective was a rood-screen, which not only had a lively story to it, but had persuaded me in the course of years that it was possibly a treasure of ecclesiastical art worth finding by one now educated to know its value. I might have been disappointed if I had seen it; I certainly was deeply disappointed at not seeing it. A wicket gate in the porch was locked against me. I ran along the wall and tried to peer into the windows, but I could see nothing, except my mental picture of the past—the three-decker, the carved screen, the two square pews in the chancel, the open seats outside.

It is rather curious that they were open seats at that time of day, when otherwise the church was quite early Victorian in its ways. I know that in the next decade, when the zeal for church restoration became noticeable, the stubborn defence of vested interests in the hereditary pews was the greatest obstacle to be overcome, and I have known it prove insuperable for nearly a decade more. Even the pews in the chancel of the church here at H——, one sacred to the old-maid daughters of the rector (when in residence, which was only for a small portion of the year), the other occupied by one of my uncles and his family, were open; not like the spacious room, with panelled walls and blue silk curtains all round above the level of his tall head, in which my maternal grandfather maintained at public worship the same privacy that he enjoyed at home. It is true that every seat, except the hard "free" forms at the back, belonged to a certain house, as legally and exclusively as the walled box which it had superseded; but there was a republican aspect, generally abhorrent to genteel persons, in the uniform open benches, which marked no divisions of caste between the highest and the lowest; the old box, on the contrary, indicated the status of its owner almost as accurately as his house. The carpet, cushions, hassocks, curtains were part of his personal establishment; if he were a big man, he would probably have a stove within the luxurious enclosure, by which to doze in comfort when the weather was cold. And it was usual for the wall immediately above him to be more or less covered with tablets to the memory of his deceased ancestors. When he died himself, the blue or red curtains which had preserved his nobility from the gaze of vulgar worshippers would be changed for hangings of black cloth, and the mourning hatchment would be put up.

In this little church the organist was the National School master, down at the bottom of the building, and his instrument in my time was a concertina. There was no vestry. The parson put his things on in the chancel (in one church that I knew he first dragged his things out of the altar, which made a convenient store-chest for the loose "properties" of the place), his sacerdotal toilet being performed quite openly before the assembled congregation, in front of a looking-glass hung upon a chancel pillar; the interest we took in this piece of ritual was great or greater according as the man was shy and nervous or self-confident and vain. The canopied three-decker embraced the whole area of ritual proper, except on the rare occasions—the three enjoined by the rubric, I suppose—when Holy Communion was celebrated. In the bottom pen the clerk bawled the responses, in the middle one the parson recited prayers and lessons, in the upper (having changed his surplice for a black gown) he preached.

Usually the parson was a curate, domestically familiar to us; sometimes he was the stout and stately rector. When he came to the beautiful embowered house that at other times wore blinds over its windows, and his haughty high-nosed daughters to that chancel pew which at other times stood empty, then it behoved the parish, literally, to sit up. With him we were comparatively at ease, but confronted with them we simply shook in our shoes. They did their parish work with vigour while they were about it. The "poor" were visited all round, scolded for their injudicious management of households on ten or twelve shillings a week, which, they were assured, would be an ample income if "crowdy" (a kind of meal porridge, I think—we never heard of it except from them) were substituted for the unnecessary luxuries they indulged in; and I believe the rectory kitchen doled broken victuals to the deserving. My father nursed a man's grudge against these well-meaning women chiefly on account of the crowdy suggestion so persistently thrust upon his farm labourers; the offensive word was so often on his lips that I have never forgotten it. He was always contrasting the existing régime with that of the late rector, who used to like to play whist and ride to hounds with him, and of whom I remember nothing but the fact of his death. My father and I, driving past the rectory gates, saw a gig slowly moving up and down before them. "Hullo!" said father, pulling up. "What's the matter?" The man in charge of the gig mournfully shook his head. "You don't say so?" father ejaculated, with even greater mournfulness. That was all. It meant that the doctor was inside, and that the rector was dying.

The existing régime, however, did not leave us out in the cold. The rector came at least once during his visit to his parish, and his daughters once, to call on us—cake-and-wine calls—and similarly honoured the houses of the other village gentry. The old man was as affable as he knew how to be; the entertaining of the old-young ladies was the formidable affair. If there was not time to set things in apple-pie order before they reached the front door, what flurry and fret and vexation of heart! Well for me if I was not doing punishment on the stairs at that awful moment!

But the story of the rood-screen that I so wanted to see, and could not, is the vivid memory of all.

The rector was in residence. He was putting on his robes in the chancel, before the looking-glass, with the dignified leisureliness that was his wont. The congregation was coming in. Amongst them was a lady from one of the farmhouses (called "The Manor," an ancient house which her family lived, instead of died, in, surrounded by a moat of stagnant water covered with arsenic-green duckweed—which house, or its site, there was not time to look for), and she was followed by a domestic pet, a raven. She knelt to her preliminary prayer. Rising from her knees she beheld the presumptuous bird sitting on the desk edge of her pew, regarding her quizzically with his head cocked to one side. I was watching him in ecstasy, but she—a gentle, fair woman, whose face as I then saw it I could identify in a crowd to-day—flushed crimson with consternation and shame. She put out a flurried hand to secure him, but he hopped out of her reach; further efforts resulted in his free flight through the church to perch on the top of the screen. There he sat, and defied the congregation to catch him—to the passionate delight, I am sure, of every child present. His poor mistress, however, was overwhelmed. She sat still, trembling and cowering, her cheeks like peonies; and the rector, when he realised the situation, was furious.