depression to a no less extreme exultation; a new heaven and a new
earth had been revealed to us in our perception of the possibility
of benefiting by the death of our friends, and I fear that for some
time we took an interest in the health of everyone in the village
whose position rendered a repetition of the dole in the least likely.

  Those were the days in which all great things seemed far off, and we
were astonished to find that Napoleon Buonaparte was an actually
living person. We had thought such a great man could only have lived a
very long time ago, and here he was after all almost as it were at our
own doors. This lent colour to the view that the Day of Judgement
might indeed be nearer than we had thought, but nurse said that was
all right now, and she knew. In those days the snow lay longer and
drifted deeper in the lanes than it does now, and the milk was
sometimes brought in frozen in winter, and we were taken down into the
back kitchen to see it. I suppose there are rectories up and down
the country now where the milk comes in frozen sometimes in winter,
and the children go down to wonder at it, but I never see any frozen
milk in London, so I suppose the winters are warmer than they used
to be.

  About one year after his wife's death Mr. Pontifex also was gathered
to his fathers. My father saw him the day before he died. The old
man had a theory about sunsets, and had had two steps built up against
a wall in the kitchen garden on which he used to stand and watch the
sun go down whenever it was clear. My father came on him in the
afternoon, just as the sun was setting, and saw him with his arms
resting on the top of the wall looking towards the sun over a field
through which there was a path on which my father was. My father heard
him say "Good-bye, sun; good-bye, sun," as the sun sank, and saw by
his tone and manner that he was feeling very feeble. Before the next
sunset he was gone.

  There was no dole. Some of his grandchildren were brought to the
funeral and we remonstrated with them, but did not take much by
doing so. John Pontifex, who was a year older than I was, sneered at
penny loaves, and intimated that if I wanted one it must be because my
papa and mamma could not afford to buy me one, whereon I believe we
did something like fighting, and I rather think John Pontifex got
the worst of it, but it may have been the other way. I remember my
sister's nurse, for I was just outgrowing nurses myself, reported
the matter to higher quarters, and we were all of us put to some
ignominy, but we had been thoroughly awakened from our dream, and it
was long enough before we could hear the words "penny loaf"
mentioned without our ears tingling with shame. If there had been a
dozen doles afterwards we should not have deigned to touch one of
them.

  George Pontifex put up a monument to his parents, a plain slab in
Paleham church, inscribed with the following epitaph:

                        SACRED TO THE MEMORY

                                  OF

                            JOHN PONTIFEX

      WHO WAS BORN AUGUST 16TH, 1727, AND DIED FEBRUARY 8, 1812,

                           IN HIS 85TH YEAR,

                                 AND OF

                        RUTH PONTIFEX, HIS WIFE,

       WHO WAS BORN OCTOBER 13, 1727, AND DIED JANUARY 10, 1811,

                             IN HER 84TH YEAR.

                  THEY WERE UNOSTENTATIOUS BUT EXEMPLARY

                       IN HER DISCHARGE OF THEIR

                   RELIGIOUS, MORAL, AND SOCIAL DUTIES

                        THIS MONUMENT WAS PLACED

                           BY THEIR ONLY SON.

  CHAPTER IV

  IN a year or two more came Waterloo and the European peace. Then Mr.
George Pontifex went abroad more than once. I remember seeing at
Battersby in after-years the diary which he kept on the first of these
occasions. It is a characteristic document. I felt as I read it that
the author before starting had made up his mind to admire only what he
thought it would be creditable in him to admire, to look at nature and
art only through the spectacles that had been handed down to him by
generation after generation of prigs and impostors. The first
glimpse of Mont Blanc threw Mr. Pontifex into a conventional
ecstasy. "My feelings I cannot express. I gasped, yet hardly dared
to breathe, as I viewed for the first time the monarch of the
mountains. I seemed to fancy the genius seated on his stupendous
throne far above his aspiring brethren and in his solitary might
defying the universe. I was so overcome by my feelings that I was
almost bereft of my faculties, and would not for worlds have spoken
after my first exclamation till I found some relief in a gush of
tears. With pain I tore myself from contemplating for the first time
'at distance dimly seen' (though I felt as if I had sent my soul and
eyes after it), this sublime spectacle." After a nearer view of the