nures who set up a carriage and crest; and a friend asked my
father what the motto would be. "Mente et manu res," was the ready
answer. There was the concert at Ipswich, where the chairman, a very
precise young clergyman, announced that "the Rev. Robert Groome will sing
(ahem!) '_Thomas_ Bowling.'" The song was a failure; my father each time
was so sorely tempted to adopt the new version. There was the old woman
whom my father heard warning her daughter, about to travel for the first
time by rail, "Whativer yeou do, my dear, mind yeou don't sit nigh the
biler." There was the old maiden lady, who every morning after breakfast
read an Ode of Horace; and the other maiden lady, a kinswoman of my
father's, who practised her scales regularly long after she was sixty.
She, if you crushed her in an argument, in turn crushed you with,
"_Well_, _there it is_." There was much besides, but memory fails, and
space.

From country clergyman to country archdeacon may seem no startling
transition; yet it meant a great change in my father's tranquil life. For
one thing it took him twice a-year up to London, to Convocation; and in
London he met with many old friends and new. Then there were frequent
outings to Norwich, and the annual visitations and the Charge. On the
first day of his first visitation, at Eye, there was the usual luncheon,
and the usual very small modicum of wine. Lunch over, the Rev. Richard
Cobbold, the author of 'Margaret Catchpole,' proposed my father's health
in a fervid oration, which wound up thus: "Gentlemen, I call upon you to
drink the health of our new archdeacon,--to drink it, gentlemen, in
flowing bumpers." It sounded glorious, but the decanters were empty; and
my father had to order (and pay for) two dozen of sherry. At an Ipswich
visitation there was the customary roll-call of the clergy, among whom
was a new-comer, a Scotchman, Mr Colquhoun. "Mr--, Mr--," faltered the
apparitor, coming unexpectedly on this uncouth name; suddenly he rose a-
tiptoe and to the emergency,--"Mr Cockahoon."

In one of the deaneries my father found a churchyard partly sown with
wheat. "Really, Mr Z---," he said to the incumbent, "I must say I don't
like to see this." And the old churchwarden chimed in, "That's what I
saa tew, Mr Archdeacon; I saa to our parson, 'Yeou go whatin' it and
whatin' it, why don't yeou tater it?'" This found its way into 'Punch,'
with a capital drawing by Charles Keene, whom my father met