His father, as I have said, wondered at him and let him alone. His
son had fairly distanced him, and in an inarticulate way the father
knew it perfectly well. After a few years he took to wearing his
best clothes whenever his son came to stay with him, nor would he
discard them for his ordinary ones till the young man had returned
to London. I believe old Mr. Pontifex, along with his pride and
affection, felt also a certain fear of his son, as though of something
which he could not thoroughly understand, and whose ways,
notwithstanding outward agreement, were nevertheless not as his
ways. Mrs. Pontifex felt nothing of this; to her George was pure and
absolute perfection, and she saw, or thought she saw, with pleasure,
that he resembled her and her family in feature as well as in
disposition rather than her husband and his.

  When George was about twenty-five years old his uncle took him
into partnership on very liberal terms. He had little cause to
regret this step. The young man infused fresh vigour into a concern
that was already vigorous, and by the time he was thirty found himself
in the receipt of not less than L1500 a year as his share of the
profits. Two years later he married a lady about seven years younger
than himself, who brought him a handsome dowry. She died in 1805, when
her youngest child Alethea was born, and her husband did not marry
again.

   CHAPTER III

  IN the early years of the century five little children and a
couple of nurses began to make periodical visits to Paleham. It is
needless to say they were a rising generation of Pontifexes, towards
whom the old couple, their grandparents, were as tenderly
deferential as they would have been to the children of the Lord
Lieutenant of the County. Their names were Eliza, Maria, John,
Theobald (who like myself was born in 1802), and Alethea. Mr. Pontifex
always put the prefix "master" or "miss" before the names of his
grandchildren, except in the case of Alethea, who was his favourite.
To have resisted his grandchildren would have been as impossible for
him as to have resisted his wife; even old Mrs. Pontifex yielded
before her son's children, and gave them all manner of licence which
she would never have allowed even to my sisters and myself, who
stood next in her regard. Two regulations only they must attend to;
they must wipe their shoes well on coming into the house, and they
must not overfeed Mr. Pontifex's organ with wind, nor take the pipes
out.

  By us at the Rectory there was no time so much looked forward to
as the annual visit of the little Pontifexes to Paleham. We came in
for some of the prevailing licence; we went to tea with Mrs.
Pontifex to meet her grandchildren, and then our young friends were
asked to the Rectory to have tea with us, and we had what we
considered great times. I fell desperately in love with Alethea,
indeed we all fell in love with each other, plurality and exchange
whether of wives or husbands being openly and unblushingly advocated
in the very presence of our nurses. We were very merry, but it is so
long ago that I have forgotten nearly everything save that we were
very merry. Almost the only thing that remains with me as a
permanent impression was the fact that Theobald one day beat his nurse
and teased her, and when she said she should go away cried out, "You
shan't go away- I'll keep you on purpose to torment you."

  One winter's morning, however, in the year 1811, we heard the church
bell tolling while we were dressing in the back nursery and were
told it was for old Mrs. Pontifex. Our manservant John told us and
added with grim levity that they were ringing the bell to come and
take her away. She had had a fit of paralysis which had carried her
off quite suddenly. It was very shocking, the more so because our
nurse assured us that if God chose we might all have fits of paralysis
ourselves that very day and be taken straight off to the Day of
Judgement. The Day of Judgement indeed, according to the opinion of
those who were most likely to know, would not under any
circumstances be delayed more than a few years longer, and then the
whole world would be burned, and we ourselves be consigned to an
eternity of torture, unless we mended our ways more than we at present
seemed at all likely to do. All this was so alarming that we fell to
screaming and made such a hullabaloo that the nurse was obliged for
her own peace to reassure us. Then we wept, but more composedly, as we
remembered that there would be no more tea and cakes for us now at old
Mrs. Pontifex's.

  On the day of the funeral, however, we had a great excitement; old
Mr. Pontifex sent round a penny loaf to every inhabitant of the
village according to a custom still not uncommon at the beginning of
the century; the loaf was called a dole. We had never heard of this
custom before; besides, though we had often heard of penny loaves,
we had never before seen one; moreover, they were presents to us as
inhabitants of the village, and we were treated as grown-up people,
for our father and mother and the servants had each one loaf sent
them, but only one. We had never yet suspected that we were
inhabitants at all; finally, the little loaves were new, and we were
passionately fond of new bread, which we were seldom or never
allowed to have, as it was supposed not to be good for us. Our
affection, therefore, for our old friend had to stand against the
combined attacks of archaeological interest, the rights of citizenship
and property, the pleasantness to the eye and goodness for food of the
little loaves themselves, and the sense of importance which was
given us by our having been intimate with someone who had actually
died. It seemed upon further inquiry that there was little reason to
anticipate an early death for any one of ourselves, and this being so,
we rather liked the idea of someone else's being put away into the
churchyard; we passed, therefore, in a short time from extreme