There was one anecdote that my father
was fond of relating, with that quiet humour
which was the nearest approach to mirth he
ever indulged in. He had succeeded, after
much trouble and opposition, in filling up
one of the vacancies in the school with a poor
but quick-witted lad, the son of a journeyman
shoemaker of the town. A day or two after
the election, a certain rich Mrs. Savory,
whose handsome son, Adolphus George, was
at that time one of my father's scholars, paid
him a visit of expostulation. She swept into
the study, all satin and musk, as my father
used to say, and seating herself, haughtily
desired to have an explanation of my father's
extraordinary conduct, and demanded the
immediate expulsion of the shoemaker's son.
My father heard her quietly to the end, and
then unlocking his bureau, drew from its
recesses a roll of yellow, timeworn parchment,
and unfolding it before the great lady,
pointed to certain passages therein, and read,
in a low distinct voice, the whole of the clause
relating to the thirty poor boys. Mrs. Savory
rustled her satins and feathers, pressed her
handkerchief to her nose, said that it was a
most extraordinary circumstance, remarked
that the weather was very fine for the season,
and that she should be happy to see my
father to dinner; and sailing slowly out of
the room, was assisted into her carriage, and
quietly disappeared. It was this same shoe-
maker's son who afterwards won so many
honours at the university, and finally became
one of the most celebrated preachers of the
day.

Our house, which was a large, old-fashioned,
inconvenient residence, was separated from
the school by a considerable piece of ground,
—half garden, half orchard. My father was
no gardener; but my mother, with the aid
of an old man one day in the week and the
forcible impressment of any idle lads she
could catch about the premises, contrived to
keep it in a very tolerable state of cultivation;
as we children grew up, half our leisure
hours were spent in it, and in our youthful
eyes it was ever a most wonderful place.
There were fruits in abundance of nearly
every kind that will grow in England in the
open air, and as my mother considered herself
a woman of some taste, flowers were not
neglected, though they were mostly of an old-
fashioned and stately kind, such as
sunflowers, hollyhocks, cabbage-roses, sweet-
williams, and gillyflowers. But the gooseberry
and currant-trees were the pride of my
mother's heart; and certainly I have never
seen elsewhere fruit equal in size and
flavour to that I was used to at home.

If my mother could be said to be
possessed by a mania for anything, it was for
making preserves, which, as we had always
a superabundance of fruit, she was enabled
to indulge to her heart's content. As the
preserving season approached, we always
noticed that my mother's temper grew
slightly acrimonious, that she gave sharp
answers to pacific questions, and that the
kitchen was dangerous ground. Pickles, she
would observe, might be a responsibility,
and home-made wines a serious undertaking;
but their weight on her mind was nothing
in comparison to that imposed by preserves.
She had a secret connected with the boiling
of them, which her mother had bequeathed
to her on her death-bed—a spell or
incantation, we children thought it; though what
it really was I never learnt, having no occasion
to make use of such knowledge. But
when the last jar was filled and covered,
all the sugar of my mother's good-nature
came back in a lump, and we might have
lived on preserves for the next six months,
if such a diet would have agreed with our
constitutions. Then followed a short but busy
season of packing-up, when immense jars had
to be sent off to remote aunts and cousins—
whose addresses we scarcely knew—and to
a host of other people who claimed us as
friends. The people of Dingwell came in for
their share in the general distribution, not
forgetting many poor families, and the old
widows in the almshouse.

I speak of these things as I remember them
when a lad; but it now becomes necessary
to go back a little farther still. My poor
father and mother had been married for ten
years before they had any children; but, at
the end of that time, two came together, as if
to make up for the long delay—my brother
Neville and my sister Ruth. As some years
elapsed after this startling event, without
any likelihood of a further increase to his
family, my father sketched in his mind a plan
of education for these two, which he
determined they should pursue together. It
may appear singular that he should wish
to give his daughter the same education as
his son; but that was one of his minor
crotchets, though based, indeed, upon his
principal one.

My father being the head of a grammar-
school was, as a matter of course, a good
classical scholar, in fact, no one could have
been better fitted for such a situation, for not
only was he acquainted with all the extant
literature of Greece and Rome, but he loved
and admired the ancient authors to an extent
that was almost fanatical. In all school
labours that had no connection with the
classics he was invariably kind and indulgent
in the extreme; but when the ancients
came in question, he at once became stern
and inflexible, and woe to any wretched
wight who stuttered over his conjugations,
or stumbled in his declensions. Long crabbed
tasks were in certain store for him, and the
cane was not always spared. Yet the lads
loved him for his simplicity and good-nature
in everything else. He used to carry marbles
in his pocket, which he would distribute to
unfortunate gamesters who had lost their
all; and he was always ready to mend any