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.