CHAPTER VIII

VESTER, CAMENAE¹

159. THE death of Charles closed the doors of my heart again for that time; and the self-engrossed quiet of the Herne Hill life continued for another year, leaving little to be remembered, and less to be told. My parents made one effort, however, to obtain some healthy companionship for me, to which I probably owe more than I knew at the moment.

Some six or seven gates down the hill towards the field, (which I have to return most true thanks to its present owner, Mr. Sopper, for having again opened to the public sight in consequence of the passage above² describing the greatness of its loss both to the neighbour and the stranger,) some six or seven gates down that way, a pretty lawn, shaded by a low spreading cedar, opened before an extremely neat and carefully kept house, where lived two people, modest in their ways as my father and mother themselves,-Mr. and Mrs. Fall; happier, however, in having son and daughter instead of an only child. Their son, Richard, was a year younger than I, but already at school at Shrewsbury, and somewhat in advance of me therefore in regular discipline; extremely gentle and good-natured,- his sister, still younger, a clever little girl, her mother’s constant companion: and both of them unpretending, but rigid, examples of all Herne Hill proprieties, true religions, and useful learnings. I shudder still at the recollection of Mrs. Fall’s raised eyebrows one day at my pronunciation of “naïveté” as “naivette.”

¹ [Horace, Odes, iii. 4, 21.]

² [See above, p. 49.]

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