A Victorian Boyhood: Episodes From "The Scarlet Tree"

by SIR OSBERT SITWELL

1

I LOOKED forward to my first experience on a London bus for days beforehand. The whole tour would take two hours, and the same bus was to bring us back to our starting place. My tutor laid stress on the necessity of obtaining two top seats on the left-hand side, for that was the best vantage point. Muffled immensely against the east wind, we made our way by 9.30 to Oxford Street, and were fortunate enough at once to obtain the places we wanted. The buses of those days had two large wheels in front and two smaller ones behind; they were painted, as they are today, in reds and whites, but were not so metallically bright and flashing. They depended on the paper placards they carried more than upon enamel, and the seats on the roof resembled garden seats.

Our vehicle was drawn by two fine horses and traveled eight miles an hour. It carried about fourteen persons on the top, which was much lower than that of the motorbus of today. And I recall, when motorbuses first came in, the fear of many passengers, as they swept under arches and viaducts at great speed and on so much higher a level, that they would be decapitated, and how, when approaching them, they involuntarily ducked their heads. But though the old horse-drawn bus may have been wanting in the feeling of prodigious power that the present conveyance imparts, though indeed this may compare as skating with walking where speed and impetus are concerned, nevertheless it atoned for that by a sense of companionship and a wealth of cockney fun, for the driver sat only just beneath, with no shelter above his head, and he would often turn round and address remarks up at you. He would, for example, comment on other drivers who passed him, and tell you their histories. And you, for your part, could question him about the buildings and vehicles you were approaching.

The London through which we drove was very different from that of today in color, shape, and rhythm. Already, of course, it was beginning to take on the cosmopolitan, nondescript air of the modern international metropolis, but the old London of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries still preponderated. In the impression of overwhelming size that it conveyed — a feature which has characterized this particular city increasingly for the last two centuries — resided, doubtless, its peculiar and most obvious fascination. Its other charms were more subtle. And I think it was upon the morning in question, a fine winter’s morning with a tattered edge of rosy and golden fog which clothed Wren’s spires in a lovely opalescence, — making them somehow not ethereal in any way, but beautiful with the perfection of a neat, clean fact or a calculation adroitly executed, — that I first realized, besides its giant proportions, and the fogs and excitement born of them, other qualities which it possessed. These factors in its aspect, new to me, made one wonder, indeed, at the vast population of house painters that the capital must support.

Consider Regent Street, down the graceful curve of which we were now driving — think of the domes and balconies and balustrades of that one street alone; a battalion of men would be required to haul it back from the deep, fog-like color which in so short a time it acquired, to the creamy shade wherewith it started its run of every two or three years. To the cult of the permanent, — of stone and concrete and marble, — London opposed an ideal of smartness, essentially temporary by its nature, of varnish and enamel and brass plates ana railings and prettily shaped shining shopwindows, and shields with the royal arms, and the delicate finical pointing of the brickwork.

And everywhere we saw vehicles and horses; vehicles that belonged to and were the very flower of the same transient civilization of paint and patent leather; horses, glossy and well-fed as nowhere else in the world, but yet, as it were, prancing, unaware of their doom, on the edge of a volcano, for the horse age was within a few short months of the outbreak of the revolution that was to destroy it utterly, curbing entirely equine power, and leaving to our sacred national animal only a trivial life of amusement in the hunting field and on the racecourse at Ascot and Goodwood; reserved for it, too, was that epitome of every kind of retrogression, the cavalry. In the course of a decade, only a score of hansom cabs were to be left in the whole of this assemblage of cities, of which at the moment they were the pride, while a new race of hard-featured, sharp-tongued mechanics was to replace the old, husky race of cabmen and drivers of buses, in the same way that the conquering horde of burgesses had ousted the aristocrats in the France of a hundred years before.

2

FOR the moment, however, London still made the carriages, and England supplied the horses, for the whole world. In the thoroughfares we traversed, we saw chiefly buses, four-wheelers, and hansoms — hansoms that with each year of the past half-century had become more elegant, the very perfect expression of the wealth of London, its luxury and its particular understanding, that I have tried to indicate, of shining, clean surfaces, of gloss and nap. This cab, too, imparted to London streets a sense of idiosyncrasy, of dash and style (just as the tandem gave it to the countryside; and here, though I abhor horses and love motors, I must admit that no racing-motor has ever exhaled the same air of elegance as a tandem, or afforded its owner such an appearance of dandical grace and swagger). The whole equipage possessed a frail and brittle elegance; every single thing about it, from the top hat and red buttonhole of the driver down to the two sliding glass panes of the front, even down to the tail, shoes, and hoofs of the horse, had polish, finish, and ingenuity. This was essentially the vehicle that had been perfected, through more than a century or two, for — and by — a continuing line of fops, beaux, macaronis, dudes, bucks, blades, swells, bloods, and mashers.

Occasionally other conveyances would pass us, a private omnibus, it may be, filled with a county family, its dogs and retainers, on the way from one terminus to another. (If there were no dogs, this fact signified Victoria Station and that the family was en route for Dover and hydrophobic foreign parts.) Gone already from the scene were chariots (known on the Continent, where they survived for cabs, as milords); gone were the pilentum, the britska, the Clarence (ancestor of the surviving, trundling “growler”), the phaeton (demi-mail, spider, and Beaufort), the dioropha, and the barouche; but broughams, landaus, coaches, wagonettes (Portland and Lonsdale), drags, victorias, and sociables, with imitation canework on their panels, all these could still be seen turning out of the endless residential quarters and heading for Hyde Park.

Horses — horses and carriages even more than people — gave London, as I remember it then, its particular distinction, for it was the capital of an island where the horse was still god, where stables were often finer than houses, and racecourses better than parks. The staccato tapping of hoofs, and not the sound of a river flowing, was the appropriate and jaunty music of London.

As for the people, the general run of them that you saw in the streets were both more smart and more shabby than they are today; whole crowds were clothed in frock coats and top hats, entire armies were crowned with bowlers; mustaches were long and upturned, — often the ends were waxed, — and there were more and fuller beards in evidence. Fewer women were hurrying or sauntering in the streets, but those we passed were both more elaborately dressed and, at the same time, more untidy; their hair, then billowing out into puffs and curls, and creeping into fringes, was never so steely neat and tight as it is today, and their figures were more ample. The rich and middle classes sported greater quantities of lace, bows, frills, tucks, and trinkets; while the poor, men equally with women, showed their distress more plainly. There were mobs, unkempt, their clothes and boots torn, the men with red noses, the women with faces blue and pinched; from these the contemporary gangs of tramps and peddlers and streetwalkers, types that vary little through the centuries in dress or appearance, were patently recruited.

Our journey was an endless jolting rumble, broken continually by sudden halts: I can only dimly recall the changing of horses which I suppose took place. The Bank of England and the Mansion House were two of the chief objects of our pilgrimage, but they proved a great disappointment to me, seeming much too black and quiet for the wealth they represented; St. Paul’s, our other lodestar, justified, on the contrary, every hope that I had formed of it. Here, even a small boy could see, was a complicated building of genius that, for all its restraint, could make no secret of its greatness, and of a magnificence that was English to the core — yet I have heard a prominent cleric condemn it as a “foreign-Iooking edifice”!

We returned home on the same bus, down Fleet Street, the Strand, and Piccadilly; and, regarded attentively, some of the buildings looked almost too modest for their size and importance, almost ostentatiously unpretentious. Devonshire House, that yellow-brick Venetian villa with its stone facings and vases, its spacious forecourt and plain, stout wooden doors (the wrought-iron gates from Chiswick House had not yet been re-erected here), exhibited a certain nonchalant grandeur, as of one who brings the country to town and refuses to bend to the conventions. But many of the other great London houses appeared, to a small boy who had no sense of dignity, to be merely quiet; graceful, perhaps, but dull.

It was the general effect that was overwhelming. Where else could there exist so many miles of square and crescent, continually repainted, as the climate enforced? Where else such a cluster of mean cities, composed of two-story houses of dirty brick, never washed, their ledges and woodwork never painted? And round these, circling them in ring after ring, the innumerable houses of the suburbs, sunk in a heavy, atrocious boredom of their own, where, in the drab and airless stillness of their sitting rooms smothered behind dusty curtains, a yawn turned to a sigh, scarcely remarked, and then to a groan, and the prosaic, out of the very depths of its want of soul, attained to the romantic and the morbid. Cities in which love, entrancing dentists, or greed, blinding insurance agents and the dealers in secondhand clothes to the fate in store for them by making them so sure of their invincible cleverness, so certain of escaping detection, drove them towards strange acts: to giving away poisoned chocolates, to drowning their wives in greasy tin baths, to murdering their lodgers with the poison off flypapers, or to mixing prussic acid with the morning glass of effervescent salts so widely advertised, together with other wares of the time, — with Pears Soap, Mazawattee Tea, and Van Houten’s Cocoa, — on the hoardings that edged these roads.

A week or so later, my sister Edith and I went to see the Tower of London, and loved its grandeur, so bleak in its black and gray, so incisive in its sawedged crenelations, the perfect setting, it seemed, for its chief treasure, the crown jewels, those small objects of unparalleled value, hidden somewhere within this vast and fortified bulk. Moreover, the clothes of the Beefeaters and the very names of the gates carried me back to the Harrisor Ainsworth world in which I liked to exist during every evening.

Here, in the Tower, I was in the future to spend many months as a young officer in the Household Brigade; just as I was to spend many nights on guard in the Bank of England, which I had seen on the journey I have described, and thus be given the opportunity to learn to know its garden courts and to come to appreciate Soane’s ingenuity as an architect; but of this, that long, delicious, exciting ride afforded me no inkling; I did not even know what career I wanted to follow when I grew up — though I was certain in my mind as to what I did not want to be: a soldier.

3

AND now, again, as I think of it, I am lying in the North Bow Room at Renishaw, and past has become present once more. What can I do to occupy my mind, and so fortify it against the fear of darkness? Though familiar with every inch of this top floor, I know nothing of it at this early hour, blotted out as it is, so I try first to chart the rooms on this side: day nursery, night nursery, maids’ room, the kitchenmaids’ room, and so on, until one comes to the barracks, a large room, now given up to storage, in which, during the eighteenth century, the visiting footmen had slept. The passage itself is broad, the oak floor rising and sinking at improbable angles under the weight of its centuries, and at intervals there are doors blocking the way.

Opposite, on the other side, farthest away and next a staircase, my mother’s maid’s room comes first. This room has details to remember: a piece of paneling that survives unexpectedly, hidden away in a large wall cupboard; a dressmaker’s dummy—a headless red bust upon which clothes could be fitted; a special bell which sounds when my mother rings it from her bedroom.

Next is a small chamber which retains the kind of cement floor that was a speciality of this neighborhood in Tudor and Jacobean times — a room now full of china; it is usually locked, but sometimes, as I pass, the door has been left open and I see large blue and white vases standing on the floor, and shelves loaded with porcelain figures and Oriental bowls and cups and plates. Outside the door of the next room, towards the end of the passage and in a corner by the old staircase, stands the most notable object of the whole corridor: a huge wooden rocking-horse, its body beautifully dappled, but with one ear missing. It must be ten hands high, almost as big as a real pony, and still moves beautifully, though it is over a hundred years old and, indeed, figures in a watercolor group of my grandfather and his sisters as children, painted in 1826 by Octavius Oakley. Moreover, it constituted a comforting presence by the door of the room opposite to that where I was lying.

There was nothing about this room ostensibly to frighten one; it was not large and was simply furnished. It had a flat marble chimney, and on the wall hung a delightfully ridiculous water-color of the bluestocking Lady Sitwell driving a pony chaise; yet a year or two later, when I was ten or eleven and slept here, I certainly went through some singular experiences.

For instance, every night in my dreams during a long period, my Sitwell grandfather, whom I had never seen, since he had died thirty years before I was born, would come up and sit by me in my room, talking as a grown-up person would to a small boy, and talking, too, — and this, which I clearly noted in my dream, was the most curious part of it, — as though he were trying by his presence to prevent my being frightened — the very sensation, of course, which his being there entailed. But it showed, as well, that he was not aware that he was dead, and I was too polite to give him an intimation of this fact or to let him see that he was terrifying me by his continued existence. These dreams were very real and I have often wondered what was the cause of them, for I had heard so little of him, my father having been two at the time of Grandfather Sitwell’s death, and so only just able to remember him at all. (When, eventually, I told my father of these dreams, he remarked, “My children would naturally interest him.”)

The noises in the room, too, the interior crackling and tapping and rapping and knocking and sudden shifting of weights, filled me with uneasiness and alarm; while the sounds from the garden below, even a whir of distant machinery that often pervaded the entire air, the trains’ hooting that could be heard loud above that of the nearer owls, flapping wanly about in the avenue, did nothing to dispel such feelings. Indeed, the slow, loud puffing of the trains, when it woke one up suddenly, resembled the sound of a huge figure of bronze, striding inexorably with an immense clang and reverberation, making the heart stop beating for an instant, and formed, I realized later, the perfect rendering for the footsteps of the statue of the Comendador as he climbed the stairs on his way to find Don Juan.

But I am anticipating again, for we are still charting the darkness. Beyond the rocking-horse outside is a door leading to a small wooden staircase ascending to the roof—at the top of it is always a huge wooden spade, left there for clearing the snow, which often lies in its season on stone gables and flat leads for months together; then come two storerooms, draped — if they are not locked and you can enter them — with cobwebs, and their old concrete floors covered with sand from the decaying walls. One room is paneled, and the other has its paper hanging on the still and dusty air in rent strips, like the remnants of ancient banners. Here a boy of the family died over a century ago at the age of eleven, and the place has never since been inhabited by the living.

The room nearest the high, slender staircase has, looking onto it, a tall, gracefully shaped eighteenthcentury window, with a rounded top; and from the door of the day nursery opposite, you could see, across the stairs, this window with — floating behind its dark, discolored panes, for there was very little light in the room — the drowned face of a statue. The day nursery itself is a thick-walled, plain, seventeenth-century room. It is clear, then, that this house is one that makes no concession to children. They are part of it, and it is not considered necessary to pander to them, as elsewhere, with special silly wallpapers and books — only with such vivid and terrifying volumes as Struwwelpeter.

Now I begin to chart the darkness of the night nursery itself, the wide bow, which gives its name to the room and has three windows in it, on the pane of one of which an inscription of three generations before, written in French, glitters, when daylight comes, like the diamond that carved it; the high lattice and wood commode, stepped like a ladder; the prints of Silver-Tongued Hely-Hutchinson and Lord Wensleydale; the walnut chest of drawers, some ugly bits of pewter; the tall-backed, very plain oak chairs that have been here since the time of the Commonwealth, when they were made.

The room was rather bare for its size, and I soon exhausted the contents; then, in place of this cataloguing, I repeated to myself the names of the rooms in the house, as they occur downstairs, where they are painted, outside the servants’ hall, under various large old-fashioned bells now obsolete. (Occasionally, one of these, long disused, would ring suddenly of itself, probably because a mouse had nibbled its wire. The sound could be heard distinctly in the dining room, and if it happened during luncheon or dinner my mother would call, “Henry! Why is that bell ringing?” And he would always reply, very respectfully, with great dignity, “Sign of Death, my lady.”) These names under the bells were printed in large white letters on large black labels, and must be a hundred years old. . . . What odd names they are, I think to myself; Assembly Room, Duke’s Room, Great Parlor, Cocked Hat Room, Tapestry Room. Lady Margaret’s Room (Who could Lady Margaret have been? I try to imagine what she was like), Oak Room, North Bow Room. I repeat the names mechanically to myself, over and over again, until I fall asleep.

Only for an instant, though, or so it seems, for I am wakened by the clatter of the iron shutter bar swinging, which, like the fall of a knife in a guillotine, decapitates night at one blow. This is always the first sound if I am asleep, for the nurserymaid enters, according to the secret rules of her profession, noiselessly, hut then proceeds to make a tremendous din unfastening the shutters and snapping up the blinds. I sit up and try to look out of the windows. You can still see nothing outside, however, but white clouds, white mist hanging round the trees. In the intervals between their indistinct shapes there is a vague appearance of brilliance, of light made lighter by surrounding vapor.

4

As a special treat, both for my grandmother and for ourselves, Edith and I were allowed to play the pianola for a quarter of an hour at a time, while Miss King-Church, holding her watch in her hand, acted as umpire so as to save disputes. This instrument offered in happy combination the joys of melody and of bicycling — even the roll of music with its thick, oleaginous paper covered with cabalistic designs of holes and streaks and dashes cut in it, even the tiny screech that the end of it gave as one tightened the roll up before inserting it in the machine, come back to me, as I write, with their old sense of delight.

And indeed my performance upon this pianola constituted a great improvement upon my former experiences as an executant musician. These had occurred at Scarborough when I was about five. Edith, who had always loved music, had then decided, on her oven initiative and out of the abundant generosity of her soul, to share the joy she herself found in it by teaching me, too, to play the piano. Her idea had been, I conceive, that no one should know of the lessons she was giving me until I had obtained a perfect mastery of my means of expression, when I would suddenly blaze out of obscurity to dazzle the world with my accomplishment.

It may be, perhaps, that her own qualifications — she was ten — were not then sufficient to furnish me with the whole art. I do not know. But unfortunately the whole house had only too quickly become aware that something was afoot, for even my rendering of the five-finger exercises was so intensely original as to attract, and so loud as to command, universal attention. Added to this, my sobs, my roars, my howls — for I much resented art being thus thrust upon me — formed a painful and resounding accompaniment. As a result, the opinion of the entire household was unanimous: my lessons must cease, il faul en finir.

No. I much preferred the pianola. I listened with pleasure, though with some sense of impatience, while Edith was performing, and when at last it came to my turn, pedaled away indefatigably, at a great speed and clinging, as it were, to the handle bars. I was fond, too, of using the brakes; for abrupt modulations of tone, from the loudest possible to the softest, were the technical device at which I excelled and wherein I believed the whole secret of my art to consist.

And I had found my audience: for though Edith may have disdained my efforts as those of a rival virtuoso, our brother Sacheverell, who was himself too young to play, listened to us both with a flattering air of respect, and even of rapture. And in all truth, these hours were memorable to the three of us, for it was therein, and after this fashion, that we first entered the magic world of Tchaikovsky’s ballet music, the greatest music of the theater—as opposed to opera, or to music pure — ever composed; thus we came to know every note of Casse-noisette, so much of Swan Lake and The Sleeping Beauty.

5

I HAVE sometimes wondered whether Aunt Mary did not come to Gosden simply in order to keep an eye on us children. I think, in her own mind, she very unfairly condemned my grandmother as too unworldly to be trusted with the supervising of a child’s education: for to the older woman education signified being brought up to use the right shibboleths, wear the right clothes, ride in the proper way and hold your riding crop correctly. It was impossible to exaggerate the importance of these things — and my mother would have agreed with her in this view. To pronounce girl as gurl, or to wear patent-leather pumps, for example, at breakfast — either of these would have constituted a sin for worse than any purely moral misdemeanor. She liked to take us aside, when my grandmother was not in the vicinity, and examine us herself in the Things That Mattered, asking one to repeat the word waistcoat (wescot) after her, and urging upon us the necessity of saying Mama and not Mummy. (In any case, we said neither, but Mother.)

Partly, of course, this concern with superficialities arose from a feeling for elegance — and she was indeed, in her own way, a very elegant old woman, both in appearance and manner; partly, since she herself had no sons or daughters, from a wish to see that the younger members of her own family continued in the way they should go. Because to her, as to everyone interested in them, the shibboleths of her own generation seemed immutable, framed to endure forever, and she never guessed that the haut ton of one age inevitably becomes the shabby vulgarism of the next, or that old fashions descend, until, for instance, only the dealers in rags and bones of the hired mourners at a funeral will wear the top hat, once England’s glory.

But even when she disapproved our ways, yet she championed us; if anyone complained of the noise we made overhead, running about and shouting, she would always say commendingly, “Dear little feet, poor young people!" On the other hand, when contemporary cousins of ours, on my grandmother’s side of the family, came to stay, she was the first to register an energetic protest against any single sound that happened to reach her. She and my mother got on well together, enjoyed a common detestation of the curate, Mr. Gramble, and were in league against him. But her favorite, her greatest friend, and perhaps the real attraction to her in this house, was Toby, my grandmother’s pet monkey.

Toby lived in a large, comfortable cage that filled the whole back of a little room on the ground floor, behind the staircase. This capering creature appealed to my grandmother, no doubt, because he seemed, as it were, part of a traveler’s tale, and she had throughout her life longed to follow the example of her father and journey to distant parts, but Germany and Italy had always bounded her world, and she had never been able to gratify this inclination.

To my Aunt Mary, however, who had been brought up, both at Renishaw and in the Highlands, with many strange pets, wildcats and eagles and red deer, the monkey was simply a most fascinating and friendly animal. Indeed, she seemed as devoted to him as my grandmother was to Mr. Gramble. They would gaze at each other through the bars with, as it appeared, the uttermost admiration. Certainly they were very unlike in appearance.

From this distance I cannot accurately name Toby’s species, but he was young, large, dark, brighteyed and blinking; hirsute, but not hirsute enough. His most striking physical feature was the pouch, between chin and throat, with which nature had equipped him, so that he might therein ueposit anything he wished to hide or swallow. He was very active, but only at times, when he would be seized by bouts of paroxysmal energy; during other long periods he would remain meditative as Buddha, and, one would hazard from his expression, dejected.

My Aunt Mary, on the other hand, was very pale, and albeit her eyes of harebell blue blinked fondly back at his, her hair was snarse and white, except for a tail, darker and more thick, which lay coiled at the back, just under the cap that crowned her head in the fashion of the women of her era. For the rest, she wore a black silk dress, gold-rimmed spectacles, and round her neck hung a long gold chain, on which was suspended a gold locket containing a miniature of her late husband. In her hand she carried a reticule, wherein, among other treasures, reposed, I recollect, a small gold vinaigrette, a very pretty object of French workmanship, made to ward off the vapors of her Byronic youth.

Every morning Aunt Mary visited Toby, either after or during family prayers; from which, in order, I think, to assert her independence, she liked to absent herself. (My grandmother could not fail to notice and disapprove such truancy, but would find it difficult to make any remonstrance.) For half an hour at a time the old lady would stand in front of the cage, watching the monkey’s antics or strange quietude. At intervals she would offer him morsels of food, fruit or nuts, repeating to herself, “Poor boy, poor little feller!” And once a day for months, and at whatever hour it might be that she came to see him, he would throw a brick out of his cage, and she, muttering terms of endearment, would pick it up and return it to him. She was “training” him, she told me. But eventually it became plain that he, looking through the bars into what must have seemed to him her larger cage, had, on the contrary, been intent during the whole of this period on training her.

To give an account of this episode, we must go back to the mainspring of the day, family prayers. On the mornings upon which Aunt Mary was not present, those gathered together could often hear, through my Aunt Florence’s twitterings concerning the prophets, the screech and chatter of the ape as he talked to his visitor. It was as though he were trying to extol and exemplify in the face of orthodox Christianity the rival current doctrine of the Origin of Species. Thus while, for example, my Aunt Florence read to us verses describing the conduct of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, the ape, our most ancient and sure ancestor, was vulgarly demonstrating, by his almost human outcry, the obvious falsity of so pretentious a family tree.

But one morning, when we were on our knees, and while my Aunt Florence was reading, in her humble and meek voice, a prayer for Peace in Our Time, suddenly we heard a scream so loud, issuing, it seemed, from some antique world of tragedy, that it made her break off in the middle of the sentence. There was an instant’s formidable silence, and then my grandmother’s voice broke in firmly, with the words, “Florence, you and Mr. Gramble had better accompany me, and we will see what has happened.” Accordingly, they hurried out, while we picked ourselves up and furtively dusted our knees.

What had happened wars this. When the monkey had thrown out the brick as usual, my Aunt Mary had as usual bent to pick it up for him. In this instant he had swooped down from his swing, and with the deftness and agility of a trained acrobat and pickpocket in one, as well as with the hardened throat of a salamander, he had thrust a simian hand through the bars and snatched from her, in a single grab, cap, coiled hair, spectacles, gold chain, gold locket, and reticule, and had triumphantly swallowed the lot, relegating this strange miscellany of objects to his pouch.

Thus, in a flash, he deprived the poor old lady both of conventional appearance and personal history. It was a final disillusionment concerning— I nearly wrote “human nature.” Actually, however, the sentimental loss of the locket may not have affected her as much as you might imagine, for her understanding, owing to her great age, was variable: sometimes she remembered, sometimes not. And only a few days before this occurrence, she had shown the miniature of the whiskered head inside it to her younger sister, Blanche, at the same time demanding to be told whose likeness it might represent.

“It’s your husband, Mary dearest.”

“Nonsense,” the old lady replied; “I never married that man! Never! I don’t know the face” — and she snapped the locket to, in a fury.

After her loss she had to go into retirement for a little, while new hair and a new cap were secured for her. She became, too, more regular in her attendance at family prayers. As for my grandmother, she felt, I apprehend, that Mary had at last learned her lesson.