122 PRÆTERITA-I

country school, my mother had there learned severely right principles of truth, charity, and housewifery, with punctilious respect for the purity of that English which in her home surroundings she perceived to be by no means as undefiled as the ripples of Wandel. She was the daughter, as aforesaid,¹ of the early widowed landlady of the King’s Head Inn and Tavern, which still exists, or existed a year or two since,² presenting its side to Croydon market-place, its front and entrance door to the narrow alley which descends, steep for pedestrians, impassable to carriages, from the High Street to the lower town.

141. Thus native to the customs and dialect of Croydon Agora, my mother, as I now read her, must have been an extremely intelligent, admirably practical, and naïvely ambitious girl; keeping, without contention, the headship of her class, and availing herself with steady discretion of every advantage the country school and its modest mistress could offer her. I never in her after-life heard her speak with regret, and seldom without respectful praise, of any part of the discipline of Mrs. Rice.

I do not know for what reason, or under what conditions, my mother went to live with my Scottish grandfather and grandmother, first at Edinburgh, and then at the house of Bower’s Well, on the slope of the Hill of Kinnoul, above Perth. I was stupidly and heartlessly careless of the past history of my family as long as I could have learnt it; not till after my mother’s death did I begin to desire to know what I could never more be told.

But certainly the change, for her, was into a higher sphere of society,-that of real, though sometimes eccentric, and frequently poor, gentlemen and gentlewomen. She must then have been rapidly growing into a tall, handsome, and very finely made girl, with a beautiful mild firmness of expression; a faultless and accomplished housekeeper, and a natural, essential, unassailable, yet inoffensive, prude.

¹ [See above, pp. 17, 18.]

² [Subsequently demolished, as noted in E. A. Martin’s Croydon: New and Old, 1904, p. 28.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]