An Autobiography of an Ancient Athlete & Antiquarian

AUTOBIOGRAPHY start for the University Boat Race, a fact which made me extremely popular for one day in the year among my friends and clients, though it also mulcted me yearly and heavily for their lunch. Here too, I indulged in greenhouses to the utmost possibility of the garden, a large span house about 40 feet by 20 feet, being most prolific in Marechal Niel roses and tomatoes. The sale of the latter paid for several years all my coal bill for the houses, but prices obtainable for early English tomatoes were then thrice what they are now. I spent a lot of money on the house and introduced two very fine mantelpieces I had picked up at Norwich, the finer being an oak one, which I had to sell when I left London, as it was too big to move, and which is now at the late Sir C. B. Lawes-Wittewronge's. 1 To revert to personal history it was on 21st December, 1884, that my brother Francis, who had long been suffer– ing from consumption, died at Ventnor, a death which was followed with startling rapidity with that of my brother, E. C. Rye, who was taken ill with small-pox on the 31st January. 1885, and died on the 7th February. Short biographies of both of these will be found in the appendix. I was myself ill in bed at the same time with what turned out to be rheumatic fever, but my wife offered to 1 I had two replicas ruade of this, one of which is at St. Leonard's Priory and the other at Anguish's House, Tom bland, which I bought inten<li11g to live in it.