Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 149.djvu/331

brated by the local epigrammatist:—

It was in the summer-house at Earl Soham that my father, a very small boy, read 'Gil Bias' to the cook, Lois Dowsing, and the sweet-heart she never married, a strapping sergeant of the Guards, who had fought at Waterloo. And it was climbing through the window of this summer-house that he tore a big rent in his breeches (he had just been promoted to them), so was packed off to bed. That afternoon my grandfather and grandmother were sitting in the summer-house, and she told him of the mishap and its punishment. "Stupid child!" said my grandfather; "why, I could get through there myself." He tried, and he too tore his small-clothes, but he was not sent to bed.

With his elder brother my father went to school at Norwich under Dr Yalpy. The first time my grandfather drove them, a forty-mile drive; and when they came in sight of the cathedral spire, he pulled up, and they all three fell a-weeping. For my grandfather was a tender-hearted man, moved to tears by the Waverley novels. Of Valpy my father would tell how once he had flogged a day-boy, whose father came the next day to complain of his severity. "Sir," said Valpy, "I flogged your son because he richly deserved it. If he again deserves it, I shall again flog him. And"—rising—"if you come here, sir, interfering with my duty, sir, I shall flog you." The parent fled.

Another old Norwich story may come in here, of two middle-aged brothers, Jeremiah and Ozias, the sons of a dead composer, and themselves performers on the pianoforte. At a party one evening Jeremiah had just played something, when Ozias came up and asked him, "Brother Jerry, what was that beastly thing you were playing?" "Ozias, it was our father's," was the reproachful answer; and Ozias burst into tears.

When my father went up to Cambridge, his father went with him, and introduced him to divers old dons, one of whom offered him this sage advice, "Stick to your quadratics, young man. I got my fellowship through my quadratics." Another, the mathematical lecturer at Peterhouse, was a Suffolk man, and spoke broad Suffolk. One day he was lecturing on mechanics, and had arranged from the lecture-room ceiling a system of pulleys, which he proceeded to explain,—"Yeou see, I pull this string; it will turn this small wheel, and then the next wheel, and then the next, and then will raise that heavy weight at the end." He pulled—nothing happened. He pulled again—still no result. "At least ta should," he remarked.

Music engrossed, I fancy, a good deal of my father's time at Cambridge. He saw much of Mrs Frere of Downing, a pupil of a pupil of Handel's. Of her he has written in the Preface to Fitz-Gerald's 'Letters.' Whether he was a member of the "Camus," I cannot be certain; anyhow, it was at Cambridge that he took up the 'cello; and there was a story how he, the future Master of Trinity, and some brother musicians, were proctorised one night, as they were returning from a festive meeting, each man performing on his several instrument.

Meanwhile, of the Earl Soham life—a life not unlike that of "Raveloe"—my father had much