surprising he should draw as well as he did. My father, who took the
living of Paleham about the year 1797, became possessed of a good many of
old Mr Pontifex's drawings, which were always of local subjects, and so
unaffectedly painstaking that they might have passed for the work of some
good early master. I remember them as hanging up framed and glazed in
the study at the Rectory, and tinted, as all else in the room was tinted,
with the green reflected from the fringe of ivy leaves that grew around
the windows. I wonder how they will actually cease and come to an end as
drawings, and into what new phases of being they will then enter.

Not content with being an artist, Mr Pontifex must needs also be a
musician. He built the organ in the church with his own hands, and made
a smaller one which he kept in his own house. He could play as much as
he could draw, not very well according to professional standards, but
much better than could have been expected. I myself showed a taste for
music at an early age, and old Mr Pontifex on finding it out, as he soon
did, became partial to me in consequence.

It may be thought that with so many irons in the fire he could hardly be
a very thriving man, but this was not the case. His father had been a
day labourer, and he had himself begun life with no other capital than
his good sense and good constitution; now, however, there was a goodly
show of timber about his yard, and a look of solid comfort over his whole
establishment. Towards the close of the eighteenth century and not long
before my father came to Paleham, he had taken a farm of about ninety
acres, thus making a considerable rise in life. Along with the farm
there went an old-fashioned but comfortable house with a charming garden
and an orchard. The carpenter's business was now carried on in one of
the outhouses that had once been part of some conventual buildings, the
remains of which could be seen in what was called the Abbey Close. The