XII. ROSLYN CHAPEL 221

work I ever did;¹ but, after all the furious excitement and wild joy of the Continent, the coming back to a Yorkshire streamside felt like returning to heaven.² We went on into well known Cumberland; my father took me up Scawfell and Helvellyn, with a clever Keswick guide, who knew mineralogy, Mr. Wright;³ and the summer passed beneficently and peacefully.

247. A little incident which happened, I fancy in the beginning of ’38, shows that I had thus recovered some tranquillity and sense, and might at that time have been settled down to simple and healthy life, easily enough, had my parents seen the chance.

I forgot to say, when speaking of Mr. and Mrs. Richard Gray,⁴ that, when I was a child, my mother had another religious friend, who lived just at the top of Camberwell Grove, or between it and the White Gate,-Mrs. Withers; an extremely amiable and charitable person, with whom my mother organized, I imagine, such schemes of alms-giving as her own housekeeping prevented her seeing to herself. Mr. Withers was a coal-merchant, ultimately not a successful one. Of him I remember only a reddish and rather vacant face; of Mrs. Withers, no material aspect, only the above vague but certain facts; and that she was a familiar element in my mother’s life, dying out of it however without much notice or miss, before I was old enough to get any clear notion of her.

In this spring of ’38, however, the widowed Mr. Withers, having by that time retired to the rural districts in reduced circumstances, came up to town on some small vestige of carboniferous business, bringing his only daughter with him to show my mother;-who, for a wonder, asked her to stay with us, while her father visited his umquhile clientage at the coal-wharves. Charlotte Withers was a

¹ [The Poetry of Architecture: see below, p. 224.]

² [The MS. has additional matter here: see the Appendix, p. 609.]

³ [For another reference to him, see Vol. I. p. 415.]

⁴ [See above, pp. 100, 101.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]