No More Learning

Now, looking
back, I am full of wonder at the number of cats we were allowed
to keep, though De la Pluche the butler, and Gray the house-
keeper, waged war against them. The cats used to come to us
from the garden; for then, as now, the open spaces of Kensing-
ton abounded in fauna. My sister used to adopt and christen
them all in turn by the names of her favorite heroes: she had


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12282
ANNE THACKERAY RITCHIE
Nicholas Nickleby, a huge gray tabby, and Martin Chuzzlewit,
and a poor little half-starved Barnaby Rudge, and many others.
Their saucers used to be placed in a row on the little terrace at
the back of my father's study, under the vine where the sour
green grapes grew - not at all out of reach; and at the farther
end of which was an empty greenhouse ornamented by the busts
of my father as a boy and of a relation in a military cloak.
One of my friends—she never lived to be an old woman
used to laugh and say that she had reached the time of life when
she loved to see even the people her parents had particularly dis-
liked, just for the sake of old times. I don't know how I should
feel if I were to meet one agreeable, cordial gentleman, who used
to come on horseback, and invite us to all sorts of dazzling
treats and entertainments,—which, to our great disappointment,
my father invariably refused, saying, "No, I don't like him; I
don't want to have anything to do with him. " The wretched
man fully justified these objections by getting himself transported
long after for a protracted course of peculiarly deliberate and
cold-blooded fraud. On one occasion, a friend told me, he was
talking to my father, and mentioning some one in good repute
at the time, and my father incidentally spoke as if he knew
of a murder that person had committed. "You know it, then! "
said the other man. "Who could have told you? " My father
had never been told, but he had known it all along, he said; and
indeed he sometimes spoke of this curious feeling he had about
people at times, as if uncomfortable facts in their past history
were actually revealed to him. At the same time I do not think
anybody had a greater enjoyment than he in other people's good-
ness and well-doing: he used to be proud of a boy's prizes at
school, he used to be proud of a woman's sweet voice or of her
success in housekeeping. He had a friend in the Victoria Road
hard by, whose delightful household ways he used to describe;
and I can still hear the lady he called Jingleby warbling "O du
schöne Müllerin," to his great delight.
Any generous thing or word seemed like something happen-
ing to himself. I can remember, when 'David Copperfield' came
out, hearing him saying in his emphatic way to my grandmother,
that "little Em'ly's letter to old Peggotty was a masterpiece. "
I wondered to hear him at the time, for that was not at all
the part I cared for most; nor, indeed, could I imagine how
little Em ly ever was so stupid as to run away from Peggotty's


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ANNE THACKERAY RITCHIE
12283
enchanted house-boat. But we each and all enjoyed in turn our
share of those thin green books full of delicious things; and how
glad we were when they came to our hands at last, after our
elders and our governess and our butler had all read them in
turn!
It is curious to me now to remember, considering how little
we met and what a long way off they lived, what an important
part the Dickens household played in our childhood. But the
Dickens books were as much a part of our home as our own
father's.
est.
Certainly the Dickens children's-parties were shining facts in
our early London days; nothing came in the least near them.
There were other parties, and they were very nice, but nothing
to compare to these: not nearly so light, not nearly so shining,
not nearly so going round and round. Perhaps so dear K. P.
suggests it was not all as brilliantly wonderful as I imagined
it; but most assuredly the spirit of mirth and kindly jollity was
a reality to every one present, and the master of the house had
that wondrous fairy gift of leadership. I know not what to call
that power by which he inspired every one with spirit and inter-
One special party I remember, which seemed to me to go
on for years, with its kind, gay hospitality, its music, its streams
of children passing and repassing. We were a little shy coming
in alone, in all the consciousness of new shoes and ribbons; but
Mrs. Dickens called us to sit beside her till the long sweeping
dance was over, and talked to us as if we were grown up,- which
is always flattering to little girls. Then Miss Hogarth found us
partners; and we too formed part of the throng. I remember
watching the white satin shoes and long flowing white sashes of
the little Dickens girls, who were just about our own age, but
how much more graceful and beautifully dressed! Our sashes.
were bright plaids of red and blue, (tributes from one of our
father's Scotch admirers; - is it ungrateful to confess now, after
all these years, that we could not bear them? ) our shoes were
only bronze. Shall I own to this passing shadow amid all that
radiance? But when people are once dancing, they are all equal
again, and happy.
Somehow after the music we all floated into a long supper-
room, and I found myself sitting near the head of the table by
Mr. Dickens, with another little girl much younger than myself;
she wore a necklace, and pretty little sausage curls all round her
――――


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ANNE THACKERAY RITCHIE
head. Mr. Dickens was very kind to the little girl, and presently
I heard him persuading her to sing, and he put his arm round.
her to encourage her; and then, wonderful to say, the little girl
stood up (she was little Miss Hullah) and began very shyly,
trembling and blushing at first, but as she blushed and trembled
she sang more and more sweetly; and then all the jeunesse dorée,
consisting of the little Dickens boys and their friends, ranged
along the supper table, clapped and clapped, and Mr. Dickens
clapped too, smiling and applauding her. And then he made a
little speech, with one hand on the table; I think it was thanking
the jeunesse dorée for their applause, and they again clapped and
laughed; but here my memory fails me, and everything grows
very vague and like a dream.
Only this much I do remember very clearly: that we had
danced and supped and danced again, and that we
were all
standing in a hall lighted and hung with bunches of Christmas
green, and as I have said, everything seemed altogether mag-
nificent and important; more magnificent and important every
minute, for as the evening went on, more and more people kept
arriving. The hall was crowded, and the broad staircase was
lined with little boys-thousands of little boys-whose heads
and legs and arms were waving about together. They were
making a great noise, and talking and shouting; and the eldest
son of the house seemed to be marshaling them. Presently their
noise became a cheer, and then another; and we looked up and
saw that our own father had come to fetch us, and that his
white head was there above the others: then came a third final
ringing cheer, and some one went up to him—it was Mr. Dick-
ens himself—who laughed and said quickly, "That is for you! "
and my father looked up,- surprised, pleased, touched,— settled
his spectacles, and nodded gravely to the little boys.
――
BRICKS AND IVY
From Old Kensington. ' Published by Harper & Brothers
A
QUARTER of a century ago, the shabby tide of progress had
not spread to the quiet old suburb where Lady Sarah Fran-
cis's brown house was standing, with its many windows daz-
zling, as the sun traveled across the old-fashioned house-tops to


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ANNE THACKERAY RITCHIE
12285
set into a distant sea of tenements and echoing life. The roar
did not reach the old house. The children could listen to the
cawing of the rooks, to the echo of the hours, as they struck on
from one day to another, vibrating from the old brown tower of
the church. At night the strokes seemed to ring more slowly
than in the day. Little Dolly Vanborough, Lady Sarah's niece,
thought each special hour had its voice. The church clock is
silent now, but the rooks caw on undisturbed from one spring
to another in the old Kensington suburb. There are tranquil
corners still, and sunny silent nooks, and ivy wreaths growing
in the western sun; and jasmines and vine-trees, planted by a
former generation, spreading along the old garden walls. But
every year the shabby stream of progress rises and ingulfs
one relic or another, carrying off many and many a landmark
and memory. Last year only the old church was standing, in
its iron cage, at the junction of the thoroughfares. It was the
Church of England itself to Dolly and George Vanborough, in
those early church-going days of theirs. There was the old
painting of the lion and the unicorn hanging from the gallery;
the light streaming through the brown saints over the commun-
ion table. In after life the children may have seen other saints
more glorious in crimson and in purple, nobler piles and arches;
but none of them have ever seemed so near to heaven as the
old Queen Anne building, and the wooden pew with its high
stools, through which elbows of straw were protruding, where
they used to kneel on either side of their aunt, watching with
awe-stricken faces the tears as they came falling from the wid-
ow's sad eyes.
Lady Sarah could scarcely have told you the meaning of those
tears as they fell: old love and life partings, sorrows and past
mercies, all came returning to her with the familiar words of the
prayers. The tears fell bright and awe-stricken as she thought
of the present, of distances immeasurable, of life and its incon-
ceivable mystery; and then her heart would warm with hope
perhaps of what might be to come, of the overwhelming possi-
bilities how many of them to her lay in the warm clasp of
the child's hand that came pushing into hers! For her, as for
the children, heaven's state was in the old wooden pew. Then
the sing-song of the hymn would flood the old church with its
homely cadence.
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12286
ANNE THACKERAY RITCHIE
"Prepare your glad voices;
Let Hisreal rejoice,"
sang the little charity children; poor little Israelites, with blue
stockings, and funny woolen knobs to their fustian caps, rejoi-
cing, though their pastures were not green as yet, nor was their
land overflowing with milk and honey. However, they sang
praises for others, as all people do at times; thanks be to the
merciful dispensation that allows us to weep, to work, to be
comforted, and to rejoice, with one another's hearts, consciously
or unconsciously, as long as life exists.
Every lane and corner and archway had a childish story for
Dolly and her brother; for Dolly most especially, because girls
cling more to the inanimate aspects of life than boys do. For
Dolly the hawthorn bleeds as it is laid low, and is transformed
year after year into iron railings and areas; for particulars of
which you are requested to apply to the railway company, and to
Mr. Taylor, the house-agent.
In those days the lanes spread to Fulham, white with blossom
in spring, or golden with the yellow London sunsets that blazed
beyond the cabbage fields. In those days there were gardens and
trees and great walls along the high-road that came from Lon-
don, passing through the old white turnpike. There were high
brown walls along Kensington Gardens, reaching to the Palace
Gate; elms spread their shade, and birds chirruped, and children
played behind them.
Dolly Vanborough and her brother had many a game there,
and knew every corner and haunt of this sylvan world of child-
ren and ducks and nurse-maids. They had knocked their noses
against the old sun-dial many and many a time. Sometimes now,
as she comes walking along the straight avenues, Dolly thinks
she can hear the echo of their own childish voices whooping
and calling to one another as they used to do. How often they
had played with their big cousin, Robert Henley, and the little
Morgans, round about the stately orange-house, and made believe
to be statues in the niches!
"I am Apollo," cries George Vanborough, throwing himself
into an attitude.
"Apollo! " cries Robert, exploding with schoolboy wit; "an
Apollo-guy, you mean. "


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ANNE THACKERAY RITCHIE
12287
So.
Dolly does not understand why the Morgan boys laugh, and
George blushes up furiously. When they are tired of jumping
about in the sun, the statues straggle homeward, accompanied
by Dolly's French governess, who has been reading a novel on a
bench close by. They pass along the front of the old Palace,
that stands blinking its sleepy windows across elmy vistas, or
into tranquil courts where sentries go pacing. Robert has his
grandmother living in the Palace, and he strides off across the
court to her apartments. The children think she is a witch and
always on the watch for them, though they do not tell Robert
The Morgans turn up Old Street, and George and Dolly
escort them so far on their way home. It is a shabby brown
street, with shops at one end, and old-fashioned houses, stone-
stepped, bow-windowed, at the other Dear Old Street! where
an echo still lingers of the quaint and stately music of the past,
of which the voice comes to us like a song of Mozart sounding
above the dreamy flutterings of a Wagner of the present! Little
Zoë Morgan would linger to peep at the parrot that lived next
door in the area, with the little page-boy, who always winked at
them as they went by; little Cassie would glance wistfully at a
certain shop-front where various medals and crosses were exposed
for sale. There were even in those days convents and Catholics
established at Kensington, and this little repository had been
opened for their use.
When they have seen the little Morgans safe into their old
brown house, very often it is John Morgan who comes to the
door to admit them (John is the eldest son, the curate, the tutor,
the mainstay of the straggling establishment),- Dolly and her
brother trudge home through the Square, followed by Made-
moiselle, still lost in her novel. The lilacs are flowering behind.
the rusty rails. The children know every flagstone and window;
they turn up a little shabby passage of narrow doorways and
wide-eaved roofs, and so get out into the high-road again. They
look up with friendly recognition at the little boy and girl, in
their quaint Dutch garb, standing on their pedestals above the
crowd as it passes the Vestry-hall; then they turn down a sun-
shiny spring lane, where ivy is growing, and brown bricks are
twinkling in the western sunshine; and they ring at a gateway
where an iron bell is swung. The house is called Church House,
and all its windows look upon gardens, along which the sunshine
comes flowing. The light used to fill Dolly's slanting wooden
-


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12288
ANNE THACKERAY RITCHIE
school-room at the top of the house. When the bells were ring-
ing, and the sun flood came in and made shadows on the wall, it
used to seem to her like a chapel full of music.
George wanted to make an altar one day, and to light Lady
Sarah's toilet candles, and to burn the sandalwood matches; but
Dolly, who was a little Puritan, blew the matches out and car-
ried the candles back to their places.
"I shall go over to the Morgans," said George, "since you
are so disagreeable. " Whether Dolly was agreeable or not, this
was what George was pretty sure to do.
DUTCH TILES
From Old Kensington. ' Published by Harper & Brothers
HERE are many disconnected pictures in Dorothea Vanborough's
gallery, drifting and following each other like the images of
a dissolving view. There are voices and faces changing;
people whom she hardly knows to be the same, appearing and
disappearing. Looking back nowadays through a score or two of
years, Dorothea can see many lights crossing and reflecting one
another, many strange places and persons in juxtaposition. She
can hear, as we all can, a great clamor of words and of laughter,
cries of pain and of sorrow and anger, through all of which sound
the sacred voices that will utter to her through life—and beyond
life, she humbly prays.
Dorothea's pictures are but mist and fancy-work; not made of
paint and canvas, as is that one which hangs over the fireplace
in the wainscot dining-room at Church House in Kensington,
where my heroine passed so much of her life. It is supposed
by some to be a Van der Helst. It represents a golden-brown
grandmother, with a coiffe and a ruffle and a grand chain round
her neck, and a ring on her forefinger, and a double-winged
house in the background. This placid-faced Dutchwoman, exist-
ing two centuries ago, has some looks still living in the face
of the Dorothea Vanborough of these days. Her descendants
have changed their name and their dress, cast away their ruffles,
forgotten the story of their early origin; but there is still a
something that tells of it,-in Dolly's slow quaint grace and
crumpled bronze hair, in her brother George's black brows, in


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ANNE THACKERAY RITCHIE
12289
their aunt Lady Sarah Francis's round brown eyes and big ears,
to say nothing of her store of blue Dutch china. Tall blue pots,
with dragon handles, are ranged in rows upon the chimney-board
under the picture. On either side of the flame below are blue
tiles, that Lady Sarah's husband brought over from The Hague
the year before he died. Abraham, Jonah, Noah, Balaam tum-
bling off his blue ass,-the whole sacred history is there, lighted
up by the flaring flame of the logs.
When first George and Dolly came to live in the old house,
then it was the pictures came to life. The ass began to call out
"Balaam! Balaam! " the animals to walk two by two (all blue)
into the ark. Jonah's whale swallowed and disgorged him night
after night, as George and Dolly sat at their aunt's knee listen-
ing to her stories in the dusk of the "children's hour"; and the
vivid life that childhood strikes even into inanimate things awak-
ened the widow's dull heart and the silent house in the old by-
lane in Kensington.
The lady over the fireplace had married in King Charles's
reign: she was Dorothea Vanborough, and the first Countess of
Churchtown. Other countesses followed in due course, of whom
one or two were engraved in the passage overhead; the last was
a miniature in Lady Sarah's own room, her mother and my
heroine's grandmother,—a beautiful person, who had grievously
offended by taking a second husband soon after her lord's demise
in 1806. This second husband was himself a member of the
Vanborough family, a certain Colonel Stanham Vanborough, .
a descendant of the lady over the chimney-piece. He was after-
ward killed in the Peninsula. Lady Sarah bitterly resented her
mother's marriage, and once said she would never forgive it.
It was herself that she never forgave for her own unforgiveness.
She was a generous-hearted woman; fantastic, impressionable, re-
served. When her mother died soon after Colonel Vanborough,
it was to her own home that Lady Sarah brought her little half-
brother, now left friendless, and justly ignored by the 'Peerage,'
where the elder sister's own life was concisely detailed as
«dau.
John Vanborough, last Earl of Churchtown, b. 1790, m. 1807, to
Darby Francis, Esq. of Church House, Kensington. "
Young Stanham Vanborough found but a cold welcome from
Mr. Francis; but much faithful care and affection, lavished, not
without remorse, by the sister who had been so long estranged.
The boy grew up in time, and went out into the world, and
XXI-769
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ANNE THACKERAY RITCHIE
12290
became a soldier as his father had been. He was a simple,
straightforward youth, very fond of his sister and loath to leave
her, but very glad to be his own master at last. He married in
India the daughter of a Yorkshire baronet; a pretty young lady,
who had come out to keep her brother's house. Her name was
Philippa Henley, and her fortune consisted chiefly in golden hair
and two pearly rows of teeth. The marriage was not so happy
as it might have been: trouble came, children died; the poor
parents, in fear and trembling, sent their one little boy home to
Lady Sarah to save his life. And then, some three years later,
their little daughter Dolly was making her way, a young traveler
by land and by sea, coming from the distant Indian station where
she had been born, to the shelter of the old house in the old
by-lane in Kensington. The children found the door open wide,
and the lonely woman on her threshold looking out for them.
Mr. Francis was dead, and it was an empty house by this time,
out of which a whole home had passed away. Lady Sarah's
troubles were over, leaving little behind; the silence of mid-life
had succeeded to the loving turmoils and jealousies and anxieties
of earlier days; only some memories remained, of which the very
tears and words seemed wanting now and then,-although other
people may have thought that if words failed the widow, the
silent deeds were there that should belong to all past affection.
One of the first things Dolly remembers is a landing-place
one bitter east-winded morning, with the white blast blowing
dry and fierce from the land, and swirling out to sea through
the leafless forest of shipping; the squalid houses fast closed and
double-locked upon their sleeping inmates; the sudden storms of
dust and wind; the distant clanking of some awakening peal; and
the bewildered ayah, in her rings and bangles, squatting on the
ground and veiling her face in white muslin.
By the side of the ayah stands my heroine, a little puppy-like
girl, staring as Indian children stare, at the strange dismal shores.
upon which they are cast; staring at the lady in the gray cloak
who had come on board, with her papa's face, and caught her in
her arms, and who is her Aunt Sarah; at the big boy of seven
in the red mittens, whose photograph her papa had shown her in
the veranda, and who is her brother George; at the luggage as
it comes bumping and stumbling off the big ship; at the passen-
gers departing. The stout little gentleman who used to take her
to see the chickens, pats Dolly on the head, and says he shall


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ANNE THACKERAY RITCHIE
12291
come and see her; the friendly sailor who carried her on shore
shakes hands, and then the clouds close in, and the sounds and
the faces disappear.
Presently into Dolly's gallery come pleasanter visions of the
old house at Kensington, to which Lady Sarah took her straight
away; with its brick wall and ivy creepers and many-paned win-
dows, and the stone balls at either side of the door,- on one of
which a little dark-eyed girl is sitting, expecting them.
"Who is dat? " says little three-year-old Dolly, running up
and pulling the child's pinafore, to make sure that she is real.
Children believe in many things: in fairies, and sudden dis-
appearances; they would not think it very strange if they were
to see people turn to fountains and dragons in the course of
conversation.
"That is a nice little girl like you," said Lady Sarah kindly.
"A nice little girl lite me? " said Dolly.
"Go away," says the little strange girl, hiding her face in her
hands.
"Have you come to play wiss me? My name is Dollicia-
vanble," continues Dolly, who is not shy, and quite used to the
world, having traveled so far.
"Is that your name? What a funny name! " says the little
girl, looking up. "My name is Rhoda, but they call me Dody
at our house. I's four years old. "
Dolly was three years old, but she could not speak quite plain.
She took the little girl's hand and stood by the ayah, watching
the people passing and repassing, the carriage being unpacked,
Lady Sarah directing and giving people money, George stumping
about in everybody's way, and then, somehow, everything and
everybody seem going up and down stairs, and in confusion;
she is very tired and sleepy, and forgets all the rest.
It is not
Next day Dolly wakes up crying for her mamma.
the ship any more. Everything is quite still, and her crib does
not rock up and down. "I sought she would be here," said poor
little Dolly, in a croaking, waking voice, sitting up with crum-
pled curls and bright warm cheeks. It is not her mamma, but
Aunt Sarah, who takes her up and kisses her, and tries to com-
fort her; while the ayah, Nun Comee, who has been lying on the
floor, jumps up and dances in her flowing white garment, and
snaps her black fingers, and George brings three tops to spin all


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12292
ANNE THACKERAY RITCHIE
at once. Dolly is interested, and ceases crying; and begins to
smile and to show all her little white teeth.
Lady Sarah rarely smiled. She used to frown so as not to
show what she felt. But Dolly from the first day had seemed
to understand her; she was never afraid of her, and she used to
jump on her knee and make her welcome to the nursery.
"Is you very pretty? " said little Dolly one day, looking at
the grim face with the long nose and pinched lips. "I think
you is a very ugly aunt. " And she smiled up in the ugly aunt's
face.
"O Dolly! how naughty! " said Rhoda, who happened to be
in Dolly's nursery.
Rhoda was a little waif protégée of Lady Sarah's. She came
from the curate's home close by, and was often sent in to play
with Dolly, who would be lonely, her aunt thought, without a
companion of her own age. Rhoda was Mr. Morgan's niece, and
a timid little thing: she was very much afraid at first of Dolly;
so she was of the ayah, with her brown face and ear-rings and
monkey hands: but soon the ayah went back to India with silver
pins in her ears, taking back many messages to the poor child-
bereft parents, and a pair of Dolly's shoes as a remembrance,
and a couple of dolls for herself as a token of good-will from
her young mistress. They were for her brothers, Nun Comee
said; but it was supposed that she intended to worship them on
her return to her native land.
The ayah being gone, little Rhoda soon ceased to be afraid of
Dolly; the kind, merry, helpful little playmate, who remained be-
hind, frisking along the passages and up and down the landing-
places of Church House. She was much nicer, Rhoda thought,
than her own real cousins, the Morgans in Old Street.
As days go by, Dolly's pictures warm and brighten from
early spring into summer-time. By degrees they reach above
the table, and over and beyond the garden-roller. They are
chiefly of the old garden, whose brick walls seem to inclose sun-
shine and gaudy flowers all the summer through; of the great
Kensington parks, where in due season chestnuts are to be found.
shining among the leaves and dry grasses; of the pond where
the ducks are flapping and diving; of the house which was little
Rhoda's home. This was the great bare house in Old Street,
with plenty of noise, dried herbs, content, children without end,


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ANNE THACKERAY RITCHIE
12293
There was also cold stalled ox on
and thick bread-and-butter.
Sundays at one.
In those days life was a simple matter to the children: their
days and their legs lengthened together; they loved, they learned,
and they looked for a time that was never to be,- when their
father and mother should come home and live with them again,
and everybody was to be happy. As yet the children thought
they were only expecting happiness.
George went to school at Frant, near Tunbridge Wells, and
came home for the holidays. Dolly had a governess too; and she
used to do her lessons with little Rhoda in the slanting school-
room at the top of Church House. The little girls did a great
many sums, and learned some French, and read 'Little Arthur's
History of England' to everybody's satisfaction.
Kind Lady Sarah wrote careful records of the children's
progress to her brother, who had sent them to the faithful old
sister at home. He heard of the two growing up with good.
care and much love in the sunshine that streamed upon the old
garden; playing together on the terrace that he remembered so
well; pulling up the crocuses and the violets that grew in the
shade of the white holly-tree. George was a quaint, clever boy,
Sarah wrote; Dolly was not so quick, but happy and obedient,
and growing up like a little spring flower among the silent old
bricks.
Lady Sarah also kept up a desultory correspondence with
Philippa, her sister-in-law. Mrs. Vanborough sent many minute
directions about the children: Dolly was to dine off cold meat for
her complexion's sake, and she wished her to have her hair
crimped; and George was to wear kid gloves and write a better
hand; and she hoped they were very good, and that they some-
times saw their cousin Robert, and wrote to their uncle, Sir
Thomas Henley, Henley Court, Smokethwaite, Yorkshire; and
she and dear papa often and often longed for their darlings.
Then came presents: a spangled dress for Lady Sarah, and silver
ornaments for Dolly, and an Indian sword for George with
which he nearly cut off Rhoda's head.


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12294
ANNE THACKERAY RITCHIE
MY FATHER'S MOTHER
From Chapters from Some Unwritten Memoirs. Copyright 1894, by Harper
& Brothers
ON
NE's early life is certainly a great deal more amusing to look
back to than it used to be when it was going on. For one
thing, it isn't nearly so long now as it was then; and re-
membered events come cheerfully scurrying up one after another,
while the intervening periods are no longer the portentous cycles
they once were. And another thing to consider is, that the peo-
ple walking in and out of the bygone mansions of life were not,
to our newly opened eyes, the interesting personages many of
them have since become: then they were men walking as trees
before us, without names or histories; now some of the very
names mean for us the history of our time. Very young people's
eyes are certainly of more importance to them than their ears,
and they all see the persons they are destined to spend their
lives with, long before the figures begin to talk and to explain
themselves.
My grandmother had a little society of her own at Paris, in
the midst of which she seemed to reign from dignity and kind-
ness of heart; her friends, it must be confessed, have not as yet
become historic, but she herself was well worthy of a record.
Grandmothers in books and memoirs are mostly alike, stately,
old-fashioned, kindly, and critical. Mine was no exception to the
general rule.
She had been one of the most beautiful women
of her time; she was very tall, with a queenly head and carriage;
she always moved in a dignified way. She had an odd taste in
dress, I remember, and used to walk out in a red merino cloak
trimmed with ermine, which gave her the air of a retired empress
wearing out her robes. She was a woman of strong feeling,
somewhat imperious, with a passionate love for little children,
and with extraordinary sympathy and enthusiasm for any one in
trouble or in disgrace. How benevolently she used to look round
the room at her many protégés, with her beautiful gray eyes!
Her friends as a rule were shorter than she was, and brisker,
less serious and emotional. They adopted her views upon poli-
tics, religion, and homœopathy, or at all events did not venture to
contradict them. But they certainly could not reach her heights,
and her almost romantic passion of feeling.
-


## p. 12295 (#341) ##########################################

12295
CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS
(1860-)
T
HE writings of Charles G. D. Roberts are distinguished by
an imaginative quality, which in its most perfect expres-
sion elevates them to a high plane of originality; and even
in its fainter manifestations lends charm to them. This quality is
instinct in both his prose and his verse; like a subtle fragrance it
attracts and eludes the reader, who will return to his poems and his
stories when works of more palpable excellence are forgotten. He
is an exquisite poet of the minor order; his limitations are well de-
fined, but within them he is complete and
satisfying. The writer of 'An Epitaph for
a Husbandman' and 'The Deserted City'
has not the range of the earth and sky;
but the fields which are his he has made
beautiful.

He is still a young man, so judgment of
his work must take account of the unknown
element of the future. He was born in
New Brunswick, Canada, in 1860; and was
the son of a Church of England clergyman,
from whom he received his early educa-
After graduation from the University
Two
of New Brunswick, he became in 1879 head- CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS
master of Chatham Grammar School.
years later he edited the Toronto Week for a short time.
In 1885
he was appointed professor of modern literature in King's College,
Windsor. He has lately resigned his chair to devote himself entirely
to literature. His first volume of poetry is entitled 'Orion and Other
Poems. ' 'In Divers Tones' appeared in 1887, and subsequently
'Songs of the Common Day,' and 'The Book of the Native. '
Much of Mr. Roberts's most finished and significant work appears
in these two last-named volumes. Songs of the Common Day' con-
tains an ode on the Shelley centenary, entitled 'Ave,' which attains
in parts to a high degree of impassioned strength and beauty. This
collection includes also a number of sonnets; in which form of verse
he is peculiarly successful, understanding as he does the spiritual
requirements of the sonnet, its temper of restraint, its frugal music.
'The Book of the Native' is rich in poems most characteristic of


## p. 12296 (#342) ##########################################

12296
CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS
the author's peculiar gifts. These are not alone a delicate sense of
melody, and a sympathetic understanding of the requirements of the
various verse forms: they include those endowments without which
true poetry cannot come into being,-passion, insight, sympathy.
Mr. Roberts's poems of nature are warm with life. To him—
"Life is good and love is eager
In the playground of the sun. »
In his Epitaph for a Husbandman' this simple, objective exulta-
tion in nature's bounties gives place to the recognition of the silent
companionship of man with Mother Earth and her creatures. The
poem bears about it the cool gray air of the twilit farm, the kindly
scent of the soil. The pathos of this, as of other of his poems, is
hidden in the general and the impersonal. It is the pathos of all
human life,— running its course, coming back at last to the great
Mother, as a child at evening. The sailor, "wooing the East to win
the West," whose "will was the water's will"; the farmer in his
fields, the child among "the comrade grasses," return to sleep on the
bosom of nature.
His lyrics are graceful and full of melody: there is the rush of
the tide in the movement of The Lone Wharf'; the passionate heart
of the night throbs in the first two verses of the Trysting Song. '
His ballads have not the same beauty; although there are lines in
them, as in all of his poems, of the true poetical quality.
Mr. Roberts's prose possesses the same imaginative quality as his
verse, though its manifestation is along different lines. In Earth's
Enigmas,' a volume of unique short stories, there is contained some
very subtle work. The scenes of these tales are nearly all laid out
of doors, in Canadian regions with which the author is familiar:
nature is less a background in them than a wild, disturbing element,
a gigantic actor in the scene itself. In two of them, 'The Young
Ravens that Call upon Him,' and 'Strayed,' there is no trace of a
human footstep. The wandering lonely winds of the wilderness are
the very spirit of these stories. In 'The Perdu' and 'The Stone
Dog' there is a certain weird imagination, which seems unlike any-
thing but the strange quality which informs the works of Poe. The
former has a mysterious beauty which impels a re-reading, although
the tale seems nothing in itself. In this entire collection, Mr. Roberts
exhibits a high degree of sensitiveness to nature, although not always
without that mixture of the pathetic fallacy which seems inevitable in
the attitude of the present-day generation towards the natural world.
Mr. Roberts's latest book, "The Forge in the Forest,' is an Aca-
dian romance; being the narrative of the Acadian ranger, Jean de
Mer, Seigneur de Briart. Like his short stories, it is instinct with
the spirit of the wilderness.


## p. 12297 (#343) ##########################################

CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS
12297
•
STRAYED
From 'Earth's Enigmas. Copyright 1895, by Lamson, Wolffe & Co.
N THE Cabineau Camp, of unlucky reputation, there was a
young ox of splendid build, but of a wild and restless nature.
He was one of a yoke, of part Devon blood, large, dark-
red, all muscle and nerve, and with wide magnificent horns. His
yoke-fellow was a docile steady worker, the pride of his owner's
heart; but he himself seemed never to have been more than half
broken in. The woods appeared to draw him by some spell.
He wanted to get back to the pastures where he had roamed un-
trammeled of old with his fellow-steers. The remembrance was
in his heart of the dewy mornings when the herd used to feed
together on the sweet grassy hillocks; and of the clover-smelling
heats of June, when they would gather hock-deep in the pools
under the green willow shadows. He hated the yoke, he hated
the winter; and he imagined that in the wild pastures he remem-
bered, it would be forever summer. If only he could get back
to those pastures!
One day there came the longed-for opportunity; and he seized
it. He was standing unyoked beside his mate, and none of the
teamsters were near. His head went up in the air, and with a
snort of triumph he dashed away through the forest. For a little
while there was a vain pursuit. At last the lumbermen gave it
up. "Let him be! " said his owner, "an' I rayther guess he'll
turn up ag'in when he gets peckish. He kaint browse on spruce.
buds an' lungwort. "
Plunging on with long gallop through the snow, he was soon
miles from camp. Growing weary, he slackened his pace. He
came down to a walk. As the lonely red of the winter sunset
began to stream through the openings of the forest, flushing
the snows of the tiny glades and swales, he grew hungry, and
began to swallow unsatisfying mouthfuls of the long moss which
roughened the tree-trunks. Ere the moon got up he had filled
himself with this fodder, and then he lay down in a little thicket
for the night.
But some miles back from his retreat a bear had chanced
upon his footprints. A strayed steer! That would be an easy
prey. The bear started straightway in pursuit. The moon was
high in heaven when the crouched ox heard his pursuer's ap-
proach. He had no idea what was coming, but he rose to his
feet and waited.


## p. 12298 (#344) ##########################################

12298
CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS
The bear plunged boldly into the thicket, never dreaming of
resistance. With a muffled roar the ox charged upon him, and
bore him to the ground. Then he wheeled, and charged again,
and the astonished bear was beaten at once. Gored by those
keen horns, he had no stomach for further encounter, and would
fain have made his escape; but as he retreated, the ox charged
him again, dashing him against a huge trunk. The bear dragged
himself up with difficulty beyond his opponent's reach; and the
ox turned scornfully back to his lair.
At the first yellow of dawn, the restless creature was again
upon the march. He pulled more mosses by the way; but he
disliked them the more intensely now, because he thought he
must be nearing his ancient pastures, with their tender grass and
their streams. The snow was deeper about him, and his hatred
of the winter grew apace. He came out upon a hillside, partly
open, whence the pine had years before been stripped, and where
now grew young birches thick together. Here he browsed on
the aromatic twigs; but for him it was harsh fare. As his hun-
ger increased he thought a little longingly of the camp he had
deserted; but he dreamed not of turning back. He would keep
on till he reached his pastures, and the glad herd of his com-
rades, licking salt out of the trough beside the accustomed pool.
He had some blind instinct as to his direction, and kept his course
to the south very strictly, the desire in his heart continually lead-
ing him aright.
That afternoon he was attacked by a panther, which dropped
out of a tree and tore his throat. He dashed under a low branch,
and scraped his assailant off; then, wheeling about savagely, put
the brute to flight with his first mad charge. The panther sprang
back into his tree, and the ox continued his quest.
Soon his steps grew weaker; for the panther's cruel claws had
gone deep into his neck, and his path was marked with blood.
Yet the dream in his great wild eyes was not dimmed as his
strength ebbed away. His weakness he never noticed or heeded.
The desire that was urging him absorbed all other thoughts,-
even, almost, his sense of hunger. This however it was easy for
him to assuage, after a fashion; for the long, gray, unnourish-
ing mosses were abundant.
----
By-and-by his path led him into the bed of a stream, whose
waters could be heard faintly tinkling on thin pebbles beneath
their coverlet of ice and snow. His slow steps conducted him
far along this open course. Soon after he had disappeared around


## p. 12299 (#345) ##########################################

CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS
12299
a curve in the distance, there came the panther, following stealth-
ily upon his crimsoned trail. The crafty beast was waiting till
the bleeding and the hunger should do its work, and the object of
its inexorable pursuit should have no more heart left for resist-
ance.
This was late in the afternoon. The ox was now possessed
with his desire, and would not lie down for any rest.
All night
long, through the gleaming silver of the open spaces, through
the weird and checkered gloom of the deep forest, heedless even
of his hunger,- or perhaps driven the more by it as he thought
of the wild clover bunches and tender timothy awaiting him,-
the solitary ox strove on. And all night, lagging far behind in
his unabating caution, the panther followed him.
At sunrise the worn and stumbling animal came out upon the
borders of the great lake, stretching its leagues of unshadowed
snow away to the south before him. There was his path, and
without hesitation he followed it. The wide and frost-bound
water here and there had been swept clear of its snows by the
wind, but for the most part its, covering lay unruffled; and the
pale dove-colors and saffrons and rose-lilacs of the dawn were
sweetly reflected on its surface.
The doomed ox was now journeying very slowly, and with
the greatest labor. He staggered at every step, and his beau-
tiful head drooped almost to the snow. When he had got a
great way out upon the lake, at the forest's edge appeared the
pursuing panther, emerging cautiously from the coverts. The
round tawny face and malignant green eyes were raised to peer
out across the expanse. The laboring progress of the ox was
promptly marked. Dropping its nose again to the ensanguined
snow, the beast resumed his pursuit, first at a slow trot, and then
at a long elastic gallop. By this time the ox's quest was nearly
done. He plunged forward upon his knees, rose again with
difficulty, stood still, and looked around him. His eyes were
clouding over, but he saw dimly the tawny brute that was now
hard upon his steps. Back came a flash of the old courage, and
he turned, horns lowered, to face the attack. With the last of
his strength he charged, and the panther paused irresolutely; but
the wanderer's knees gave way beneath his own impetus, and his
horns plowed the snow. With a deep bellowing groan he rolled
over on his side, and the longing and the dream of the pleasant
pastures faded from his eyes. With a great spring the panther


## p. 12300 (#346) ##########################################

12300
CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS
was upon him, and
knew naught of it.
quered him.
the eager teeth were at his throat,— but he
No wild beast, but his own desire, had con-
When the panther had slaked his thirst for blood, he raised
his head and stood with his fore-paws resting on the dead ox's
side, and gazed all about him.
To one watching from the lake shore, had there been any one
to watch in that solitude, the wild beast and his prey would have
seemed but a speck of black on the gleaming waste. At the
same hour, league upon league back in the depth of the ancient
forest, a lonely ox was lowing in his stanchions, restless, refusing
to eat, grieving for the absence of his yoke-fellow.
THE UNSLEEPING
From 'Book of the Native. ' Copyright 1896, by Lamson, Wolffe & Co.
SOOTHE to unimagined sleep
The sunless bases of the deep;
And then I stir the aching tide
That gropes in its reluctant side.
I heave aloft the smoking hill;
To silent peace its throes I still.
But ever at its heart of fire
I lurk, an unassuaged desire.
I wrap me in the sightless germ
An instant or an endless term;
And still its atoms are my care,
Dispersed in ashes or in air.
I hush the comets one by one
To sleep for ages in the sun;
The sun resumes before my face
His circuit of the shores of space.
The mount, the star, the germ, the deep,
They all shall wake, they all shall sleep.
Time, like a flurry of wild rain,
Shall drip across the darkened pane.
Space in the dim predestined hour
Shall crumble like a ruined tower.
I only, with unfaltering eye,
Shall watch the dreams of God go by.


## p. 12301 (#347) ##########################################

CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS
12301
AN EPITAPH FOR A HUSBANDMAN
From Book of the Native. Copyright 1896, by Lamson, Wolffe & Co.
E WHO Would start and rise
Before the crowing cocks,—
No more he lifts his eyes,
Whoever knocks.
HⓇ
He who before the stars
Would call the cattle home,-
They wait about the bars
For him to come.
Him at whose hearty calls
The farmstead woke again,—
The horses in their stalls
Expect in vain.
Busy and blithe and bold,
He labored for the morrow;
The plow his hands would hold
Rests in the furrow.
His fields he had to leave,
His orchards cool and dim;
The clods he used to cleave
Now cover him.
But the green, growing things
Lean kindly to his sleep; -
White roots and wandering strings,
Closer they creep.
Because he loved them long,
And with them bore his part,
Tenderly now they throng
About his heart.
Β΄
THE LITTLE FIELD OF PEACE
From Book of the Native.