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id my grandfather; "why, I could get through there myself." He tried, and he too tore his small- clothes, but he was not sent to bed.

With his elder brother, John Hindes , my father went to school at Norwich under Valpy. The first time my grandfather drove them, a forty-mile drive; and when they came in sight of the cathedral spire, he pulled up, and they all three fell a-weeping. For my grandfather was a tender-hearted man, moved to tears by the Waverley novels. Of Valpy my father would tell how once he had flogged a day-boy, whose father came the next day to complain of his severity. "Sir," said Valpy, "I flogged your son because he richly deserved it. If he again deserves it, I shall again flog him. And"--rising--"if you come here, sir, interfering with my duty, sir, I shall flog you." The parent fled.

The following story I owe to an old schoolfellow of my father's, the Rev. William Drake. "Among the lower boys," he writes, "were a brother of mine, somewhat of a pickle, and a classmate of his, who in after years blossomed into a Ritualistic clergyman, and who was the son of a gentleman, living in the Lower Close, not remarkable for personal beauty. One morning, as he was coming up the school, the sound of weeping reached old Valpy's ears: straightway he stopped to investigate whence it proceeded. 'Stand up, sir,' he cried in a voice of thunder, for he hated snivelling; 'what is the matter with you?' 'Please, sir,' came the answer, much interrupted by sobs and tears, 'Bob Drake says I'm uglier than my father, and that my father is as ugly as the Devil.'"

Music engrossed, I fancy, a good deal of my father's time at Cambridge. He saw much of Mrs Frere of Downing, a pupil of a pupil of Handel's. Of her he has written in the Preface to FitzGerald's 'Letters.' He was a member of the well-known "Camus"; and it was he who settled the dispute as to precedence between vocalists and instrumentalists with the apt quotation, "The singers go before, the minstrels follow after." He was an instrumentalist himself, his instrument the 'cello; and there was a story how he, the future Master of Trinity, and some brother musicians were proctorised one night, as they were returning from a festive meeting, each man performing on his several instrument.

To the days of my father's first curacy belongs the story of the old woman at Tannington, who fell ill one winter when the snow was on the ground. She got worse and worse, and sent for Dr Mayhew, who questioned her as to the cause of her illness. Something she said made him think that the fault must lie with either her kettle or her tea-pot, as she seemed, by her account, to get worse every time she drank any tea. So he examined the kettle, turned it upside down, and then, in old Betty's own words, "Out drop a big toad. He tarned the kittle up, and out ta fell flop." Some days before she had "deeved" her kettle into the snow instead of filling it at the pump, and had then got the toad in it, which had thus been slowly simmering into toad-broth. At Tannington also they came to my father to ask him to let them have the church Bible and the church key. The key was to be spun round on the Bible, and if it had pointed at a certain old woman who was suspected of being a witch, they would have certainly ducked her.

A score of old faded letters, close-written and crossed, are lying before me: my father wrote them in 1835 to his father, mother, and brother from Brussels, Mainz, Leipzig, Dresden, Prague, Munich, &c. At Frankfurt he dined with the Rothschilds, and sat next the baroness, "who in face and figure was very like Mrs Cook, and who spoke little English, but that little much to the purpose. For one dish I must eat because 'dis is Germany,' and another because 'dis is England,' placing at the word a large slice of roast-beef on my plate. The dinner began at half-past two, and lasted three mortal hours, during the first of which I ate because I was hungry, during the second out of politeness, and during the third out of sheer desperation." Then there is a descent into a silver- mine with the present Lord Wemyss , a gruesome execution of three murderers, and a good deal besides of some interest,--but the interest is not of Suffolk.

During his six years' Dorset curacy my father was elected mayor of the little borough of Corfe Castle; and it was in Dorset, on 1st February 1843, that he married my mother, Mary Jackson , the youngest daughter of the Rev. James Leonard Jackson, rector of Swanage, and of Louisa Decima Hyde Wollaston. Her father, my grandfather, was a great taker of snuff; and one blustery day he was walking upon the cliffs when his hat blew off. He chased it and chased it over two or three fields until at last he got it in the angle of two stone walls. "Aha! my friend, I think I have you now," said my grandfather, and proceeded to take a leisurely pinch of snuff, when a puff of wind came and blew the hat far out to sea. There are many more Dorsetshire stories that recur to my memory; but neither here is the interest of Suffolk. So to Suffolk we will come back, like my father in 1845, in which year he succeeded his father as rector of Monk Soham.

The parish has no history, unless that a former rector, Thomas Rogerson, was sequestrated as a royalist in 1642, and next year his wife and children were turned out of doors by the Puritans. "After which," Walker tells us, "Mr Rogerson lived with a Country-man in a very mean Cottage upon a Heath, for some years, and in a very low and miserable Condition." But if Monk Soham has no history, its church, St Peter's, is striking even among Suffolk churches, for the size of the chancel, the great traceried east window, and the font sculptured with the Seven Sacraments. The churchyard is pretty with trees and shrubs--those four yews by the gates a present from FitzGerald; and the rectory, half a mile off, is almost hidden by oaks, elms, beeches, and limes, all of my father's and grandfather's planting. Else the parish soon will be treeless. It was not so when my father first came to it. Where now there is one huge field, there then would be five or six, not a few of them meadows, and each with pleasant hedgerows. There were two "Greens" then--one has many years since been enclosed; and there was not a "made" road in the entire parish--only grassy lanes, with gates at intervals. "High farming" has wrought great changes, not always to the profit of our farmers, whose moated homesteads hereabouts bear old-world names--Woodcroft Hall, Blood Hall, Flemings Hall, Crows Hall, Windwhistle Hall, and suchlike. "High farming," moreover, has swallowed up most of the smaller holdings. Fifty years ago there were ten or a dozen farms in Monk Soham, each farm with its resident tenant; now the number is reduced to less than half. It seems a pity, for a twofold reason: first, because the farm-labourer thus loses all chance of advancement; and secondly, because the English yeoman will be soon as extinct as the bustard.

Midway between the rectory and Tom Pepper's is the "Guildhall," an ancient house, though probably far less ancient than its name. It is parish property, and for years has served as an almshouse for ten or a dozen old people. My father used to read the Bible to them, and there was a black cat once which would jump on to his knees, so at last it was shut up in a cupboard. The top of this cupboard, however, above the door, was separated from the room only by a piece of pasted paper; and through this paper the cat's head suddenly emerged. "Cat, you bitch!" said old Mrs Wilding, and my father could read no more. Nay, his father laughed too when he heard the story.

The average age of those old Guildhall people must have been much over sixty, and some of them were nearly centenarians--Charity Herring, who was always setting fire to her bed with a worn-out warming-pan, and James Burrows, of whom my father made this jotting in one of his note-books: "In the year 1853 I buried James Burrows of this parish at the reputed age of one hundred years. Probably he was nearly, if not altogether that age. Talking with him a few years before his death, I asked if his father had lived to be an old man, and he said that he had. I asked him then about his grandfather, and his answer was that he had lived to be a 'wonnerful owd man.' 'Do you remember your grandfather?' 'Right well: I was a big bor when he died.' 'Did he use to tell you of things which he remembered?' 'Yes, he was wery fond of talking about 'em: he used to say he could remember the Dutch king coming over.' James Burrows could not read or write, nor his father probably before him: so that this statement must have been based on purely traditional grounds. Assume he was born in 1755 he would have been a 'big bor,' fifteen years old, in 1770; and assume that his grandfather died in 1770 aged ninety-six, this would make him to have been born in 1675, fourteen or fifteen years before William of Orange landed."

Susan's treatment of Harry Collins, a crazy man subject to fits, was wise and kind. Till Harry came to live with the Kemps, he had been kept in bed to save trouble. Susan would have no more of bed for him than for ordinary folks, but sent him on many errands and kept him in excellent order. Her commands to him usually began with, "Co', Henry, be stirrin';" and he stood in wholesome awe of her, and obeyed her like a child. His fits were curious, for "one minute he'd be cussin' and swearin', and the next fall a-prayin'." Once, too, he "leapt out of the winder like a roebuck." Blind James Seaman, the other occupant of Susan's back-room, came of good old yeoman ancestry. He wore a long blue coat with brass buttons; and his favourite seat was the sunny bank near our front gate.

In the room over Susan Kemp's lived Will Ruffles and his wife, a very faithful old couple. The wife failed first. She had hurt herself a good deal with a fall down the rickety stairs. Will saw to her to the last, and watched carefully over her. The schoolmistress then, a Miss Hindmarsh, took a great liking for the old man; and a friend of hers, a widow lady in London, though she had never seen him, made him a regular weekly allowance to the end of his life--two shillings, half-a-crown, and sometimes more. This gave Will many little comforts. Once when my sister took him his allowance, he told her how, when he was a young man, a Gipsy woman told him he should be better off at the end of his life than at the beginning; and "she spook truth," he said, "but how she knew it I coon't saa." Will suffered at times from rheumatism, and had great faith in some particular green herb pills, which were to be bought only at one particular shop in Ipswich. My sister was once deputed to buy him a box of these pills, and he told her afterwards, "Them there pills did me a lot of good, and that show what fooks saa about rheumatics bein' in the boones ain't trew, for how could them there pills 'a got into the boones?" He was very fond of my father, whom he liked to joke with him. "Mr Groome," he once said, "dew mob me so."

Will, like many other old people in the parish, believed in witchcraft,--was himself, indeed, a "wise man" of a kind. My father once told him about a woman who had fits. "Ah!" old Will said, "she've fallen into bad hands." "What do you mean?" asked my father; and then Will said that years before in Monk Soham there was a woman took bad just like this one, and "there wern't but me and John Abbott in the place could git her right." "What did you do?" said my father. "We two, John and I, sat by a clear fire; and we had to bile some of the clippins of the woman's nails and some of her hair; and when ta biled"--he paused. "What happened?" asked my father; "did you hear anything?" "Hear anything! I should think we did. When ta biled, we h'ard a loud shrike a-roarin' up the chimley; and yeou may depind upon it, she warn't niver bad no more."

Mrs Curtis was quite a character--a little woman, with sharp brown eyes that took in everything. Her tongue was smooth, her words were soft, and yet she could say bitter things. She had had a large family, who married and settled in different parts. One son had gone to New Zealand--"a country, Dr Fletcher tell me, dear Miss, as is outside the frame of the earth, and where the sun go round t'other way." It was for one of her sons, when he was ill, that my mother sent a dose of castor-oil; and next day the boy sent to ask for "some more of Madam Groome's nice gravy." Another boy, Ephraim, once behaved so badly in church that my father had to stop in his sermon and tell Mrs Curtis to take her son out. This she did; and from the pulpit my father saw her driving the unfortunate Ephraim before her with her umbrella, banging him with it first on one side and then on the other. Mrs Curtis it was who prescribed the honey- plaster for a sore throat. "Put on a honey-plaster, neighbour dear; that will draw the misery out of you." And Mrs Curtis it was who, having quarrelled with another neighbour, came to my father to relate her wrongs: "Me a poor lone widow woman, and she ha' got a father to protect her." The said father was old James Burrows, already spoken of, who was over ninety, and had long been bedridden.

Mrs Mullinger was a strange old woman. People said she had an evil eye; and if she took a dislike to any one and looked evilly at their pigs, then the pigs would fall ill and die. Also, when she lived next door to another cottage, with only a wall dividing the two chimneys, if old Mrs Mullinger sat by her chimney in a bad temper, no one on the other side could light a fire, try as they might.

Phoebe Smith and her husband Sam lived in one of the downstair rooms. At one time of her life Phoebe kept a little dame's school on the Green. One class of her children, who were reading the Miracles, were called "Little Miracles"; and whenever my father went in, "Little Miracles" were called up by that name to read to him. Old Phoebe had intelligence above the common; she read her Bible much, and thought over it. She was fond, too, of having my sister read hymns to her, and would often lift her hands in admiration at any passage she particularly liked. She commended a cotton dress my sister had on one day when she went to see her--a blue Oxford shirting, trimmed with a darker shade. "It is a nice solemn dress," she said, as she lifted a piece to examine it more closely; "there's nothing flummocky about it."

Among the other Guildhall people were old Mrs "Ratty" Kemp, widow of the Rat-catcher; old one-eyed Mrs Bond, and her deaf son John; old Mrs Wright, a great smoker; and Mrs Burrows, a soldier's widow, our only Irishwoman, from whom Monk Soham conceived no favourable opinion of the Sister Isle. Of people outside the Guildhall I will mention but one, James Wilding, a splendid type of the Suffolk labourer. He was a big strong man, whose strength served him one very ill turn. He was out one day after a hare, and a farm-bailiff, meeting him, tried to take his gun; James resisted, and snapped the man's arm. For this he got a year in Ipswich jail, where, however, he learnt to read, and formed a strong attachment for the chaplain, Mr Daniel. Afterwards, whenever any of us were driving over to Ipswich, and James met us, he would always say, "If yeou see Mr Daniel, dew yeou give him my love." Finally, an emigration agent got hold of James, and induced him to emigrate, with his wife, his large family, and his old one-legged mother, to somewhere near New Orleans. "How are you going, Wilding?" asked my father a few days before they started. "I don't fare to know rightly," was the answer; "but we're goin' to sleep the fust night at Debenham" , "and that'll kinder break the jarney." They went, but the Southern States and the negroes were not at all to their liking, and the last thing heard of them was they had moved to Canada.

From country clergyman to country archdeacon may seem no startling transition; yet it meant a great change in my father's tranquil life. For one thing it took him twice a-year up to London, to Convocation; and in London he met with many old friends and new. Then there were frequent outings to Norwich, and the annual visitations and the Charge. On the first day of his first visitation, at Eye, there was the usual luncheon, and the usual very small modicum of wine. Lunch over, the Rev. Richard Cobbold, the author of 'Margaret Catchpole,' proposed my father's health in a fervid oration, which wound up thus: "Gentlemen, I call upon you to drink the health of our new archdeacon,--to drink it, gentlemen, in flowing bumpers." It sounded glorious, but the decanters were empty; and my father had to order two dozen of sherry. At an Ipswich visitation there was the customary roll-call of the clergy, among whom was a new-comer, a Scotchman, Mr Colquhoun. "Mr--, Mr--," faltered the apparitor, coming unexpectedly on this uncouth name; suddenly he rose a- tiptoe and to the emergency,--"Mr Cockahoon."

Two London reminiscences, and I have done. A former Monk Soham schoolmistress had married the usher of the Marlborough Street police court. My father went to see them, and as he was coming away, an officious Irishman opened the cab-door for him, with "Good luck to your Rivirince, and did they let you off aizy?" And once my father was waiting on one of the many platforms of Clapham Junction, when suddenly a fashionably dressed lady dropped on her knees before him, exclaiming, "Your blessing, holy Father." "God bless me!" cried my father,--then added quietly, "and you too, my dear lady."

Fooks alluz saa as they git old, That things look wusser evry day; They alluz sed so, I consate; Leastwise I've h'ard my mother saa,

When she was growed up, a big gal, And went to sarvice at the Hall, She han't but one stuff gownd to wear, And not the lissest mite of shawl.

But now yeou caan't tell whue is whue; Which is the missus, which the maid, There ain't no tellin'; for a gal, Arter she's got her wages paid,

And 'taint the lissest bit o' use To tell 'em anything at all; They'll only laff, or else begin All manner o' hard names to call.

Praps arter all it 'tain't the truth, That one time's wusser than the t'other; Praps I'm a-gittin' old myself, And fare to talk like my old mother.

I shaan't dew nowt by talkin' so, I'd better try the good old plan, Of spakin' sparing of most folks, And dewin' all the good I can.

J. D.

My father used to repeat one stanza of an old song; I wonder whether the remainder still exists in any living memory. That one stanza ran:--

"The roaring boys of Pakefield, Oh, how they all do thrive! They had but one poor parson, And him they buried alive."

Whether the prosperity of Pakefield was to be dated or derived from the fact of their burying their "one poor parson" is a matter of dangerous speculation, and had better be left in safe obscurity; else other places might be tempted to make trial of the successful plan. But can any one send a copy of the whole song?

From the same authority I give a stanza of another song:--

"The cackling old hen she began to collogue, Says she unto the fox, 'You're a stinking old rogue; Your scent it is so strong, I do wish you'd keep away;' The cackling old hen she began for to say."

The tune, as I still remember it, is as fine as the words--for fine they certainly are, as an honest expression of opinion, capable of a large application to other than foxes.

I cannot vouch for a like antiquity for the following sea-verses; but they are so good that I venture to append them to their more ancient brethren:--

"And now we haul to the 'Dog and Bell,' Where there's good liquor for to sell; In come old Archer with a smile, Saying, 'Drink, my lads, 'tis worth your while.'

Ah! but when our money's all gone and spent, And none to be borrowed nor none to be lent; In comes old Archer with a frown, Saying, 'Get up, Jack, let John sit down.'"

Alas, poor Jack! and John Countryman too, when the like result arrives.

J. D.

Fifteen years after my father had penned this note, and more than two years after his death, I received from a West Indian reader of 'Maga,' who had heard it sung by a naval officer , the following version of the second sea-song:--

"Cruising in the Channel with the wind North-east, Our ship she sails nine knots at least; Our thundering guns we will let fly, We will let fly over the twinkling sky-- Huzza! we are homeward bound, Huzza! we are homeward bound.

And when we arrive at the Plymouth Dock, The girls they will around us flock, Saying, 'Welcome, Jack, with your three years' pay, For we see you are homeward bound to-day'-- Huzza! we are homeward bound, Huzza! we are homeward bound.

Ah! but when our money's all gone and spent, And none to be borrowed, nor none to be lent, Old Okey meets us with a frown, Saying, 'Get up, Jack, let John sit down, For I see you are outward bound,' For, see, we are outward bound."

I am werry much obligated to yeou, Mr Editer, for printin' my lines. I hain't got no more at spresent, so I'll send yeou a queery instead. I axed our skule-master, "What's a queery?" and he saa, "Suffen queer," so I think I can sute yeou here.

JOHN DUTFEN.

This story has a sequel. My father told it once at the dinner-table of one of the canons in Norwich. Every one laughed more or less, all but one, the Rev. "Hervey Du Bois," a rural dean from the Fens. He alone made no sign. But he was staying in the house; and that night the Canoness was aroused from her sleep by a strange gurgling sound proceeding from his room. She listened and listened, till, convinced that their guest must be in a fit, she at last arose, and listened outside his door. A fit he was in--sure enough--of laughter. He was sitting up in bed, rocking backwards and forwards, and ever and again ejaculating, "Why, John bor, yeou must ha' meant to bile yar master alive." And then he went off into another roar.

"That piece of song, That old and antique song we heard last night."

RECTOR.

Come, all ye valiant soldiers That march to follow the drum, Let us go meet with Captain Ward When on the sea he come.

He is as big a rover As ever you did hear, Yeou hain't h'ard of such a rover For many a hundred year.

There was three ships come sailing From the Indies to the West, Well loaded with silks and satins And welwets of the best.

Who should they meet but Captain Ward, It being a bad meeting, He robbed them of all their wealth, Bid them go tell the King.

Away went these three gallant ships, Sailing down of the main, Telling to the King the news That Ward at sea would reign.

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