see him now--it is my first clear recollection of him--leaning back
in the corner of my father's carriage as we drove from the Newmarket
station to our summer home at Mondisfield. He and I were small boys of
eight, and Derrick had been invited for the holidays, while his twin
brother--if I remember right--indulged in typhoid fever at Kensington.
He was shy and silent, and the ice was not broken until we passed
Silvery Steeple.

"That," said my father, "is a ruined church; it was destroyed by
Cromwell in the Civil Wars."

In an instant the small quiet boy sitting beside me was transformed. His
eyes shone; he sprang forward and thrust his head far out of the window,
gazing at the old ivy-covered tower as long as it remained in sight.

"Was Cromwell really once there?" he asked with breathless interest.

"So they say," replied my father, looking with an amused smile at the
face of the questioner, in which eagerness, delight, and reverence were
mingled. "Are you an admirer of the Lord Protector?"

"He is my greatest hero of all," said Derrick fervently. "Do you
think--oh, do you think he possibly can ever have come to Mondisfield?"

My father thought not, but said there was an old tradition that the
Hall had been attacked by the Royalists, and the bridge over the moat
defended by the owner of the house; but he had no great belief in the
story, for which, indeed, there seemed no evidence.

Derrick's eyes during this conversation were something wonderful to see,
and long after, when we were not actually playing at anything, I used
often to notice the same expression stealing over him, and would cry
out, "There is the man defending the bridge again; I can see him in your
eyes! Tell me what happened to him next!"

Then, generally pacing to and fro in the apple walk, or sitting astride
the bridge itself, Derrick would tell me of the adventures of my
ancestor, Paul Wharncliffe, who performed incredible feats of valour,
and who was to both of us a most real person. On wet days he wrote
his story in a copy-book, and would have worked at it for hours had my
mother allowed him, though of the manual part of the work he had, and
has always retained, the greatest dislike. I remember well the comical
ending of this first story of his. He skipped over an interval of ten
years, represented on the page by ten laboriously made stars, and did
for his hero in the following lines:

"And now, reader, let us come into Mondisfield churchy