miserable exceedingly, I sat in an upstairs room with my mother and her
sisters; and still comes back to me her figure, seated on a sofa, with
fixed white face and dull vacant eyes, counting the minutes till the
funeral procession would have reached Kensal Green, and then following in
mechanical fashion, prayer-book in hand, the service, stage by stage,
until to my unspeakable terror, with the words, dully spoken, "It is all
over", she fell back fainting. And here comes a curious psychological
problem which has often puzzled me. Some weeks later she resolved to go
and see her husband's grave. A relative who had been present at the
funeral volunteered to guide her to the spot, but lost his way in that
wilderness of graves. Another of the small party went off to find one of
the officials and to enquire, and my mother said: "If you will take me to
the chapel where the first part of the service was read, I will find the
grave". To humor her whim, he led her thither, and, looking round for a
moment or two, she started from the chapel, followed the path along which
the corpse had been borne, and was standing by the newly-made grave when
the official arrived to point it out. Her own explanation was that she
had seen all the service; what is certain is, that she had never been to
Kensal Green before, and that she walked steadily to the grave from the
chapel. Whether the spot had been carefully described to her, whether she
had heard others talking of its position or not, we could never
ascertain; she had no remembrance of any such description, and the matter
always remained to us a problem. But after the lapse of years a hundred
little things may have been forgotten which unconsciously served as
guides at the time. She must have been, of course, at that time, in a
state of abnormal nervous excitation, a state of which another proof was
shortly afterwards given. The youngest of our little family was a boy
about three years younger than myself, a very beautiful child, blue-eyed
and golden haired--I have still a lock of his hair, of exquisite pale
golden hue--and the little lad was passionately devoted to his father. He