the sect after his father's death. He had married a daughter of Irving, the originator of the sect.
The Gardiners of Goring, Oxfordshire, are a good old county family. My uncle, Rawson Bodham, was a second son, so did not inherit Goring, but my aunt was buried there.
My Aunt Emily was the artist of the family, among the daughters. She painted groups of peasant girls and animals, with a great deal of skill; but being self-taught, she lacked much of the technique acquired by experience of generations of painters.
She had a refined and sweet temper, and I owe much to her for her kindness to me as a child. She would take me into her painting-room and give me prints to colour, and supplied me with brush and paint-box, thus keeping me quiet and interested for hours. She was not a beauty like my Aunt Margaret, but she had a pleasing face beaming with kindliness.
I presume that the whooping-cough had left subsequent weakness in my lungs. Moreover, I was growing fast, long and lanky, and several eminent physicians were called in to examine me, as already said. They rapped me on the chest, hammered me on the back between the shoulder-blades, as though they were driving tin-tacks, they put trumpets to my ribs, counted the pulsations of my heart, their gold repeaters in hand; they peered down my throat with telescopes armed with reflectors, they pulled out my tongue, touched my tonsils and uvula with caustic, and, shaking their heads, pronounced that I was not strong, that the utmost care must be taken of me, that I must be given abundance of nourishing diet and plenty of Devonshire clotted cream (here I perked up and nodded satisfaction), that I should be removed to some warm climate, away from the cold, the rains and fogs of England (here my father pricked up his ears, and manifested his concurrence by jerks up and down in his chair).
On going over the Lew Estate, my father had seen that it was in a forlorn condition, and would demand a heavy outlay to put all to rights. Now, considered he, to come into landed property is not, as one may say, all jam. The estate has been going back for some years, let it go back a few more, and then I will buckle to and do my best for it. So he resolved on absenting himself from England for awhile and enjoying himself. He had a cogent excuse for so doing in the judgment of the doctors
