was a white sheepskin rug in front of it, and as soon as my father with the four eldest children had left the house, I ladled the whole of the burning coals out of the grate and put them on the hearthrug. An appalling stench arose as the wool caught fire; the place was filled with smoke, and I left the room, quite impenitent and merely interested to know what on earth would happen next. The smoke must by now have penetrated to the rest of the house, for I met my mother running downstairs, and she asked me if I knew what that smell was. I told her that I didn’t, and went up to the nursery. Presently, having extinguished the fire, she followed me, and again asked me if I was sure I didn’t know anything about it. Upon which I told her that it was I who had emptied the fire on to the rug. A fine spanking followed, which I did not in the least resent, and I was told to go to bed till I was sorry. I never was sorry—for it was demoniacal possession—but I suppose that some time I must have got up again.
Friendships had sprung up between us and other children at Mrs. Giles’s day-school, and among these was May Copeland, who was Nellie’s particular friend, and told us that she was descended from Oliver Cromwell. This was very distinguished, and I fully meant to marry her. There was also a girl whose name I forget, and she was responsible for one of the greatest surprises of my young life, for one day while she and I were looking for a tennis ball in the bushes, she took my hands and drew them upwards against her bosom. I found to my astonishment that instead of being flat, she had two swellings there, and I asked her if they were bruises. She seemed rather offended and said that they certainly were not. Then there was Willie Burton to whom I told, in the spirit of bravado, what I had done to the sheepskin hearthrug, and he thought it very magnificent. He used to get phosphorus matches from his father’s table, which was grand, for we only used Bryant and May’s safety matches, and our great game was to retire into the blackness of the tool-house, wet the palms of our hands, and rub on the phosphorus which glowed with a mysterious light. He had an awful story which I entirely believed of an aunt of his on whom a practical joker played a dreadful trick, for he wrote up in phosphorus above his aunt’s bed the text, “This night shall thy soul be required of thee.” On which his poor aunt went raving mad, and I got a general distrust of phosphorus. … Willie Burton was dressed in sailor clothes, and I in a short jacket and knickerbockers, and one day with a sense of almost excessive adventure, we undressed in the tool-house and each put on the other’s clothes. We then opened the door in order to let daylight behold this transformation, and swiftly changed back again. That was a wonderful thing to have done, and when we met next day at the gymnasium we looked at each other’s clothes with glances of secret knowledge.
My final remembrance at Lincoln is perhaps the most vivid of all, for the sense of it was not that of a momentary impression, but of a growing reality. Every evening now we came down to my mother’s room and for half an hour before bedtime she read Dickens aloud to us, sitting in front of the fire. She liked to have her hair stroked, so I used to stand behind her chair, passing my fingers over the smooth brown hair above her forehead, and listening to the story of the Kenwigses. Her voice and the contact of my fingers on her hair wakened in me the knowledge of how I loved her.
CHAPTER IV
THE NEW HOME AT TRURO
ONE morning a most exciting bomb-shell exploded in the Chancery and blew Lincoln into fragments. It came in the shape of two letters, one from the Prime Minister, Lord Beaconsfield, offering my father the Bishopric of the newly created see of Truro in Cornwall, the other from Queen Victoria, saying that she personally hoped that he would accept it. These letters must have arrived a few days before we knew of them, for that day my father told us that he had thought it over and had settled to go. I felt nothing whatever except wild delight and excitement, unmingled as far as I am aware, with any regret for leaving Lincoln, and all the time that we were out for our walk that morning Maggie and I, instead of telling each other stories, whispered with secret smiles, “The Lord Bishop of Truro! The Lord Bishop of Truro!” We were vastly proud of my father, and thought it most sensible of Lord Beaconsfield and the Queen to have selected him.[A]
[A] Lord Beaconsfield seems to have been as pleased as we were at my father’s accepting the bishopric, for he wrote exultantly to a friend, saying, “Well, we have got a Bishop.”
The fresh move came in the spring of 1877, and in that loveliest of all seasons the train slid one evening across the tall wooden viaducts with the lights of Truro pricking the dusk, where the town lay below, and the enchantment of Cornwall instantly began to weave its spell. The new home was the Vicarage of Kenwyn, a small village high on the western hills and perhaps a mile from the centre of the town. As a house it was not comparable for amenities and mysteries with the Chancery of Lincoln, but what was the garden at Lincoln, for all its towers and rolling banks, in comparison to the garden here and the fields and water-haunted valleys which encompassed it? The garden at Lincoln, confined within its brick walls and planted down in the middle of a town, was like some caged animal that here roamed wild and untamed.
Oh, unforgettable morning when for the first time I awoke in the new house, and saw on the ceiling the light of the early sun that shone in through the copse outside, making a green and yellow dapple on the whitewash! The house was still silent; opposite me was Hugh’s bed with his head half-hidden in the sheet, and I dressed stealthily and went downstairs and out. From the lawn I could see the viaduct over which we had come, and below it the misty roofs of the town, with one steeple piercing the vapour into sunlight. Then the mist faded like a frosty breath and beyond the town there stretched broad and shining the estuary of the Fal. Instead of the sorry serge of ivy, the house was clad with tree-fuchsias, and magnolia, and climbing roses and japonica: never was there such a bower of a habitation. On that April morning no doubt the fuchsia and the roses were not in flower, but looking back now, that moment seems to have sucked into itself the decorations of all the months, making in my mind a composite picture, from which I cannot now disentangle the true component parts. But surely there was a gorse bush at the corner of the house, on the edge of the copse through which the sun had shone, and surely it was on that morning that I found a mossy feathery little football of a tit’s nest, woven inextricably among the spines of the gorse, and a virago of an infinitesimal bird peeped out of the circular door, when I drew too near, and scolded me well for my intrusion. I passed up the winding path that led through the shrubbery, and found a circular pleasance with a summer-house. I went cautiously past a row of beehives; I came through a door into a lane below the churchyard, where ferns (the sort of things not known before to exist in other localities than greenhouses and tables laid for dinner-parties) grew quite carelessly in the crevices, and so back, now breathlessly scampering and surfeited with impressions past woodshed and haystack and stable, and upstairs again with heart and shoes alike drenched with the spring-dew.
All that ensuing summer, lessons I fancy were considerably relaxed, and the lovely months passed like some fugue built on the subjects of that early walk, coloured, amplified and decorated. My father gave us a prize for botany (all specimens to be personally gathered, personally pressed, and mounted on sheets of cartridge paper with the English, and, if possible, the Latin name written below), and we scoured the hedges and liquid water-sides and the edges of the growing hay meadows, with a definite object in view. Study was necessitated by the addition of those names (Latin if possible), but this, like some homœopathic dose conveyed in honey, was drowned in the delight of rambling explorations. The appetite of the collector was whetted; there was a certain craving created for exact knowledge, but far above that was the interest in the loveliness that we should not otherwise have noticed, and the admiration which the interest engendered. Definitely also I think I trace a love of words in themselves which this studied collecting gave us, for what child could write “centaury” or “meadow-sweet,” “bee-orchis,” “comfrey,” “loosestrife,” or in more exalted spheres, “Osmunda regalis” on the virgin sheet
