of the Castle Specter, in both of which pieces my father
had performed in private theatricals, before my mother, and a select
Edinburgh audience, when he was a boy of sixteen, and she, at grave
twenty, a model housekeeper, and very scornful and religiously
suspicious of theatricals. But she was never weary of telling me, in
later years, how beautiful my father looked in his Highland dress, with
the high black feathers.

In the afternoons, when my father returned (always punctually) from his
business, he dined, at half-past four, in the front parlour, my mother
sitting beside him to hear the events of the day, and give counsel and
encouragement with respect to the same;--chiefly the last, for my father
was apt to be vexed if orders for sherry fell the least short of their
due standard, even for a day or two. I was never present at this time,
however, and only avouch what I relate by hearsay and probable
conjecture; for between four and six it would have been a grave
misdemeanour in me if I so much as approached the parlour door. After
that, in summer time, we were all in the garden as long as the day
lasted; tea under the white-heart cherry tree; or in winter and rough
weather, at six o'clock in the drawing-room,--I having my cup of milk,
and slice of bread-and-butter, in a little recess, with a table in front
of it, wholly sacred to me; and in which I remained in the evenings as
an Idol in a niche, while my mother knitted, and my father read to
her,--and to me, so far as I chose to listen.

The series of the Waverley novels, then drawing towards its close, was
still the chief source of delight in all households caring for
literature; and I can no more recollect the time when I did not know
them than when I did not know the Bible; but I have still a vivid
remembrance of my father's intense expression of sorrow mixed with
scorn, as he threw down Count Robert of Paris, after reading three or
four pages; and knew that the life of Scott was ended: the scorn being a
very complex and bitter feeling in him,--partly, indeed, of the book
itself, but chiefly of the wretches who were tormenting and selling the
wrecked intellect, and not a little, deep down, of the subtle dishonesty
which had essentially caused the ruin. My father never could forgive
Scott his concealment of the Ballantyne partnership.

Such being the salutary pleasures of Herne Hill, I have next with deeper
gratitude to chronicle what I owe to my mother for the