3H EARLY REMINISCENCES stared, and positively refused to proceed. A tree was something so strange that it frightened him. I had to drag him past the tree by main force. In 1863 my mother died of cancer in the jaw, brought on I have little doubt, by wearing false back teeth made of rhinoceros horn, that pressed unduly on the gums. For some time she came down and sat in the hall, but a death-watch ticked there, and my Aunt Kate, who was constantly with her through that terrible illness, had her chair moved into the drawing-room, and there, at once, the death-watch began to tick. " My dear Kate," said my mother, " do not trouble about that. I know very well for whom and for what purpose the watch ticks." I do not recall having heard the death-watch in the house since. My mother was a peculiarly sweet and saintly person. She must have been beautiful; her features were finely cut. She possessed an exquisite voice, singing deliciously ; and in speaking, she possessed that wave-like tone which belonged to ladies of high culture in the Early Victorian period, but which is so seldom heard now : soft, flexible, and without a harsh note in it. My mother had been brought up in the old traditional Church principles. She would never communicate other than fasting, although in those days there were no early Celebrations in Lew Church. She also used Cosin's " Cosening devotions," as Prynne called them, and said her short " hour " offices seven times a day. She read to us on Sundays and Festivals the appropriate compositions in The Christian Year. In the afternoon, when we came away from church service, she had been wont to give us children a long talk on religious matters, and doubtless did much to form a moral tone in us, and in me to give my mind a Church direction. At the same time I am obliged to admit that I never could recall what my mother had said to us. She certainly taught us nothing definite, but give us pious moralizing, and these lectures left me not merely unsatisfied, as did the expurgated sermons my father read out to us every Sunday evening, but they even irritated me ; and that solely because so many words were employed about nothing substantial. What I had always craved for was definite teaching. The indefinite was my aversion. I noticed afterwards that the most voluminous preachers, with
