An Autobiography of an Ancient Athlete & Antiquarian

II2 AUTOBIOGRAPHY harebell still lingered in its grass, it was two hundred years ago part of the old heath and bad been filched off it when the house was built. Its garden ran up the hill and rose so high that when I erected a rough wooden gazebo at its top I could see from it the Tower of London, the House of Commons with the "Big Ben'' on the Victoria Tower, clearly enough to check my time with it, just as one could see Windsor Castle from the White Stone pond. It was full of fruit trees and one white heart cherry of an enormous size ripened bushels of fine fruit yearly, only, however, to be invariably eaten in one night by the starlings. Pied flycatchers nested in the cherries on the north wall and annually a pair of hawfiuches took toll of my peas. Roses flourished extremely, and altogether it was a rus in urbe only a furlong or so outside the 4 mile radius, and the old red brick house with its wrought iron gates had a great fascination for me. Two of my younger children nearly came to untimely deaths there, for escaping from their nursery they walked round the house by the narrow parapet but not knowing the danger came round safely. I can't say I cared for the Monday-Tuesday journeys to London, for I stayed in lodgings with one of my sons (A.L.R.) in various places, which, I think, he must have chosen for the express purpose of having the maxitnum of noise with the minimum of convenience. One I specially remember was poised over or next door to the G.N. Railway main line, and the exJJress trains through the night rocked me out of sleep, while another adjoined a milk depot, into which many thousand reverberating milk cans were rolled over granite sets from 2-45 a.m. Still they had the effect of making the Norwich factory hooters comparatively sweet to me each week on returning. My furniture came down on the 24th May, and my family soon after joined me at Norwich, the girls and servants on the 22nd, and my wife and Kitty on the 26th. On the 30th I heard that Frognal House had been sold for £4,125, and a week later we had the satisfaction of seeing the procession to celebrate the relief of Pretoria, from a window at the corner of the Market Place, the effect of the various societies marching with torches. down London Street being very fine, though the "mafficking" was too pronounced. ·