de was the mistress of a happy home, the mother of many
handsome sons and fair daughters. The two eldest, Hurrell and
Robert, were especially striking, brilliant lads, popular at Eton,
their father's companions in the hunting-field or on the moors. But
in Dartington Rectory, with all its outward signs of prosperity and
welfare, there were the seeds of death. Before Anthony Froude, the
youngest of eight, was three years old, his mother died of a
decline, and within a few years the same illness proved fatal to
five of her children. The whole aspect of life at Dartington was
changed. The Archdeacon retired into himself and nursed his grief in
silence, melancholy, isolated, austere.

This irreparable calamity was made by circumstances doubly
calamitous. Though destined to survive all his brothers and sisters,
Anthony was a weak, sickly child, not considered never heard the
mention of his mother's name, or was the Archdeacon himself capable
of showing any tenderness whatever. In place of a mother the little
boy had an aunt, who applied to him principles of Spartan severity.
At the mature age of three he was ducked every morning at a trough,
to harden him, in the ice-cold water from a spring, and whenever he
was naughty he was whipped. It may have been from this unpleasant
discipline that he derived the contempt for self-indulgence, and the
indifference to pain, which distinguished him in after life. On the
other hand, he was allowed to read what he liked, and devoured
Grimm's Tales, The Seven Champions of Christendom, and The Arabian
Nights. He was an imaginative and reflective child, full of the
wonder in which philosophy begins.

The boy felt from the first the romantic beauty of his home.
Dartington Rectory, some two miles from Totnes, is surrounded by
woods which overhang precipitously the clear waters of the River
Dart. Dartington Hall, which stood near the rectory, is one of the
oldest houses in England, originally built before the Conquest, and
completed with great magnificence in the reign of Richard II. The
vast banqueting-room was, in the nineteenth century, a ruin, and
open to the sky. The remains of the old quadrangle were a treasure
to local antiquaries, and the whole place was full of charm for an
imaginative boy. Mr. Champernowne, the owner, was an intimate friend
of the Archdeacon, to whom he left the guardianship of his children,
so that the Froudes were as much at home in their squire's house as
in the p