s, including Fanny, the nurse. What an age, when
two dollars a head was exorbitant! What Mrs. Hume charged us I know not,
but it is only just to admit that it must have been a good deal less
than one hundred dollars a week; though, again, it must not be forgotten
that translucent bread-and-butter is not expensive. We were sent there,
I suppose, in order to remind us that this was still the world that we
were living in, after all, and not yet Paradise. We came out from her
sobered and chastened, but cheerful still; and meanwhile we visited
Stonehenge and other local things of beauty or interest. Then Mr.
Bennoch (who, to tell the truth, had introduced Mrs. Hume to us) invited
us to spend a month at his house in Blackheath, while he and his wife
were making a little tour in Germany, and we arrived at this agreeable
refuge during the first half of July. My father records that he was as
happy there as he had ever been since leaving his native land. It was
a pleasant little house, in a semi-countrified spot, and it contained,
besides the usual furniture proper to an English gentleman and his wife
of moderate fortune, a little Scotch terrier named Towsey, who commanded
much of the attention of us children, and one day inadvertently bit my
thumb; and I carry the scar, for remembrance, to this day.

Many well-known persons passed across our stage here; and London,
with all its wonders, was at our doors, the wide expanse of its
smoke-piercing towers visible in our distance. All the while my father
kept the official part of himself at Liverpool, where his consular
duties still claimed his attention; he went and came between Mrs.
Blodgett's and Black-heath. The popularity of the incomparable
boarding-house in Duke Street had continued to increase, and he was
obliged to bestow himself in a small room at the back of the building,
which was reputed to be haunted by the spirit of one of his predecessors
in office, who had not only died in it, but had often experienced there
the terrors of delirium tremens; but the ghost, perhaps from a sentiment
of diplomatic etiquette, never showed itself to my father. Or it may
have been that the real self of him being in Blackheath, what remained
was not sufficient to be conscious of a spiritual presence. He came and
went, like sunlight on a partly cloudy day. I recollect taking a walk
over the Heath at evening with him and the doctor who was attending my
mother; Mr. Bennoch was with us; it must hav