girl when she married, and little more when I can first recall her
busy fingers and her gentle voice. I see her as a lovely woman with
kind, dove's eyes, somewhat short of stature it is true, but
carrying herself very bravely. In my memories of those days she is
clad always in some purple shimmering stuff, with a white kerchief
round her long white neck, and I see her fingers turning and darting
as she works at her knitting. I see her again in her middle years,
sweet and loving, planning, contriving, achieving, with the few
shillings a day of a lieutenant's pay on which to support the
cottage at Friar's Oak, and to keep a fair face to the world. And
now, if I do but step into the parlour, I can see her once more,
with over eighty years of saintly life behind her, silver-haired,
placid-faced, with her dainty ribboned cap, her gold-rimmed glasses,
and her woolly shawl with the blue border. I loved her young and I
love her old, and when she goes she will take something with her
which nothing in the world can ever make good to me again. You may
have many friends, you who read this, and you may chance to marry
more than once, but your mother is your first and your last.
Cherish her, then, whilst you may, for the day will come when every
hasty deed or heedless word will come back with its sting to hive in
your own heart.

Such, then, was my mother; and as to my father, I can describe him
best when I come to the time when he returned to us from the
Mediterranean. During all my childhood he was only a name to me,
and a face in a miniature hung round my mother's neck. At first
they told me he was fighting the French, and then after some years
one heard less about the French and more about General Buonaparte.
I remember the awe with which one day in Thomas Street, Portsmouth,
I saw a print of the great Corsican in a bookseller's window. This,