said: "Take me away! take me away! you ought never to have brought me
here!" No wonder she was considered a dour child! I immediately and
humbly obeyed.

It was truly the simple life we led in Hertfordshire. From scrubbing
floors and lighting fires, cooking, gardening, and harnessing the pony,
I grew thinner than ever--as thin as a whipping-post, a hurdle, or a
haddock! I went to church in blue-and-white cotton, with my servant in
silk. "I don't half like it," she said. "They'll take you for the cook,
and me for the lady!"

We kept a goat, a dear fellow whom I liked very much until I caught him
one day chasing my daughter. I seized him by his horns to inflict severe
punishment; but then I saw that his eyes were exactly like mine, and it
made me laugh so much that I let him go and never punished him at all.

"Boo" became an institution in these days. She was the wife of a doctor
who kept a private asylum in the neighboring village, and on his death
she tried to look after the lunatics herself. But she wasn't at all
successful! They kept escaping, and people didn't like it. This was my
gain, for "Boo" came to look after me instead, and for the next thirty
years I was her only lunatic, and she my most constant companion and
dear and loyal friend.

We seldom went to London. When we did, Ted nearly had a fit at seeing so
many "we'els go wound." But we went to Normandy, and saw Lisieux,
Mantes, Bayeux. Long afterwards, when I was feeling as hard as sandpaper
on the stage, I had only to recall some of the divine music I had heard
in those great churches abroad to become soft, melted, able to act. I
remember in some cathedral we left little Edy sitting down below while