My cousins, Mary and Kate, had two rooms filled with pictures and other treasures, which were approached by a very steep staircase of their own. I soon began to be especially devoted to Kate, but I thought it perfect rapture to pay both of them visits in their rooms and "make waxworks" with the little bits of coloured wax off the taper-candles which they collected for me. Besides, in her room Kate kept a wonderful little live owl. My cousin Arthur Stanley was also very attractive to me. He was quite young at this time—had not taken his Oxford degree, I think—and had a very charming and expressive countenance. If it had not been for this, and his winning smile, I suppose that in manners (certainly in dress) he would have been thought very wanting. He scarcely ever spoke to strangers, and coloured violently when spoken to. His father he was most piteously afraid of. I do not think he was quite comfortable and at home with any one except his two sisters. But he noticed me a good deal as a child, and told me stories out of the History of England, which I liked immensely. Hugh Pearson, afterwards my dear friend, recollected how, on overhearing him and Arthur in the chapel talking about the inscription on the tomb of Bishop Sparrow, who wrote the "Rationale," I exclaimed, "Oh cousin Arthur, do tell me about Bishop Sparrow and the Russian lady." I used to play with the children of Canon Wodehouse, who, with his charming wife, Lady Jane, lived close to the Palace. With their two youngest daughters, Emily and Alice, I was great friends, and long kept up a childish correspondence with them, on the tiniest possible sheets of paper. Emily had bright red hair, but it toned down, and after she grew up she was very much admired as Mrs. Legh of Lyme. On the way to the Ferry lived Professor Sedgwick, who was always very kind to me. He once took me with him to a shop and presented me with a great illustrated "Robinson Crusoe."
From MY MOTHER'S JOURNAL.
"Stoke, Feb. 12, 1840.—Augustus's chief delight of late has been stories out of the History of England, and the 'Chapter of Kings' is a continual source of interest and pleasure. His memory in these things is very strong and his quick apprehension of times and circumstances. I should say the historical organ was very decided in him, and he seems to have it to the exclusion of the simple childlike view of everything common to his age. In reading the account of the flood yesterday he asked, 'What books did Noah take into the Ark? he must have taken a Bible.'—'No—the people lived after his time.'—'Then he must have had one of Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel.'—'How dreadful it must have been for Noah to see all the dead bodies when he came out of the Ark.'
"'How much ground there will be when we all die!'—'Why so?'—'Because we shall all turn to dust.'
"There is a strong predominance of the intellectual over the moral feeling in him, I fear, and it must be my endeavour always to draw out and encourage the love of what is good and noble in character and action. His eyes, however, always fill with tears on hearing any trait of this kind, and he readily melts at any act of self-denial or affection, so that his talking little of these things must not perhaps be dwelt upon as a sure sign of not estimating them."
"August 5.—There is just the same greediness in Augustus now about books that there used to be about flowers, and I have to restrain the taste for novelty and excitement. Reading of a little girl who was fond of her Bible, he said, 'I should not have been so. I like my fat Yellow Book much better, but I like the Bible far better than the Prayer-Book: I do not like that at all.'"
In this year of 1840, Uncle Julius accepted the Archdeaconry of Lewes, which wrought a change in our quiet life from the great number of clergy who were now constant guests at the Rectory and the greater frequency of clerical subjects of discussion at Lime. Once a year also, we went regularly to Hastings for a night before my uncle gave his charge to the clergy, driving back late afterwards through the hot lanes. I always liked this expedition and scrambling about with Lea on the mile of open common which then intervened between St. Leonards and Hastings: but it was dreadfully tantalising, when I was longing to go to the sea on the second day, that I was expected to remain for hours in the hot St. Clement's Church, while the sermon and charge were going on, and that the charge, of which I understood nothing except that I hated it, sometimes lasted three hours!
Mr. John Nassau Simpkinson[23] was now curate to my uncle, and lived in "the Curatage" at Gardner Street with his sister Louisa and her friend Miss Dixon, whom we saw constantly. They persuaded my mother to have weekly "parish tea-parties," at which all the so-called "ladies of the parish" came to spend the evening, drink tea, and work for the poor, while one of them read aloud from a Missionary Report. I think it was also at the suggestion of Miss Simpkinson that my mother adopted a little Hindoo girl (whom of course she never saw), putting her to school, paying for her, and otherwise providing for her.
A little excitement of our quiet summer was the marriage, in our old church, of my half-uncle Gustavus Hare, then a handsome young officer, to a pretty penniless Miss Annie Wright. It was a most imprudent marriage, and would probably have been broken off at the last moment, if my mother had not been melted by their distress into settling something (£1200 I think) upon them. I remember that it was thought a good omen that a firefly (one had never been seen at Hurstmonceaux before) perched, with its little lamp, upon the bride on the evening before the marriage. Mrs. Gustavus Hare proved an admirable wife and a good mother to her army of children. They lived for some time in Devonshire, and then in Ireland: whence, in 1868, they went to Australia, and afterwards passed entirely out of the family horizon, though I believe many of the children are still living.
In the autumn, a great enjoyment was driving in our own little carriage, with "Dull," the old horse (mother, Uncle Julius, Lea, and I), to spend a few days with the Penrhyns at Sheen, sleeping at Godstone and passing through Ashdown Forest. In those days, however, by starting early and posting, the journey from Lime to London could be accomplished in one day, but our annual journey from London to Stoke (in Shropshire) occupied three days. My mother and I used to play at "gates and stiles," counting them, through the whole journey. Unluckily the swinging motion of our great travelling chariot always made me so sick that I had a horror of these journeys; but we had pleasant hours in the evenings at the old posting-inns, with their civil old-fashioned servants and comfortable sitting-rooms with the heavy mahogany furniture which one so seldom sees now, and sometimes we arrived early enough for a walk, which had all the interest of an expedition into an unknown territory. Well do I remember certain fields near the comfortable old inn of Chapel House, and the daisies which Lea and I used to pick there. After my Aunt Kitty gave me my first taste for antiquities when showing me, at Stoke, the picture of Old Time in the frontispiece of Grose's "Antiquities," these journeys had a fresh interest, and greatly did I delight in the glimpse of Brambletye House, as we passed through Ashdown Forest, and the little tower of Stafford Castle at the top of its wooded hill. Once also we slept at Peterborough and saw its cathedral, and on the way to Norwich it was always an ecstasy to see and draw Thetford Abbey.
On the third day from London, when evening was drawing to a close, we began to reach familiar scenes—the inn of "the Loggerheads," with the sign of the two heads and the motto—
"We three
Loggerheads be."
Market-Drayton, paved with round pebbles, over which the carriage jolted violently, the few lamps being lighted against the black and white houses at the dark street corners: Little Drayton shabbier still, with the gaudy sign of the Lord Hill public-house, then of "The Conquering Hero," with the same intention: Stoke Heath, at that time a wild pine-wood carpeted with heather: some narrow lanes between high hedgerows: a white gate in a hollow with river-watered meadows: a drive between steep mossy banks with beech-trees, and a glimpse of an old church and tufted islands rising from the river in the flat meadows beyond: then the long windows and projecting porch of a