CHAPTER XVII 1863 IN 1858 my grandmother, Diana Amelia Baring-Gould, died at Teignmouth, at the advanced age of ninety-three years. She was the daughter of Joseph Sabine of Tewin in Herts, and must have been very pretty when young. She and her sister, afterwards Mrs. Browne, as girls were at Naples when Nelson was there, and they wrote home to their brother, Edward Sabine, full accounts of the balls they had attended, and how they had danced with Nelson, what he had said and what he was doing ; also much relative to Lady Hamilton. On their way home they halted in Geneva, which was beseiged by the French. To escape from it they hired a boat to take them to Lausanne, and were fired at by the French from the shore, and the two girls, for safety, lay in the bottom of the boat. From Lausanne they made their way to England. My cousin, Harriet Browne, in sorting out the old letters of Sir Edward Sabine, came on a packet of these epistles, and thinking they might interest my father sent them to him. But he did not care even to look at them, and passed them on to his brother Charles, the rector, who skimmed through them and then flung them into the fire, so that all I know of their contents is what he told me and his children. My grandmother was a very managing woman, systematic in all her proceedings, and possessed a store-room well furnished with drugs and plasters, wherewith she doctored the villagers. She also took in The Light of the West, a religious periodical conducted by the Rev. H. A. Simcoe of Penhele, and disseminated it in the parish, together with tracts by the S.P.C.K.—thus dosing both the bodies and the souls of the people. There was one article in her cabinet of which I had frequent experience, and against which I harboured a lively hatred. This was a leaden spoon with a hinged cover, and a tubular handle. The spoon was filled with castor oil, the thumb of my grandmother 306
