had never before
seen one; moreover, they were presents to us as inhabitants of the
village, and we were treated as grown up people, for our father and
mother and the servants had each one loaf sent them, but only one. We
had never yet suspected that we were inhabitants at all; finally, the
little loaves were new, and we were passionately fond of new bread, which
we were seldom or never allowed to have, as it was supposed not to be
good for us. Our affection, therefore, for our old friend had to stand
against the combined attacks of archaeological interest, the rights of
citizenship and property, the pleasantness to the eye and goodness for
food of the little loaves themselves, and the sense of importance which
was given us by our having been intimate with someone who had actually
died. It seemed upon further inquiry that there was little reason to
anticipate an early death for anyone of ourselves, and this being so, we
rather liked the idea of someone else's being put away into the
churchyard; we passed, therefore, in a short time from extreme depression
to a no less extreme exultation; a new heaven and a new earth had been
revealed to us in our perception of the possibility of benefiting by the
death of our friends, and I fear that for some time we took an interest
in the health of everyone in the village whose position rendered a
repetition of the dole in the least likely.

Those were the days in which all great things seemed far off, and we were
astonished to find that Napoleon Buonaparte was an actually living
person. We had thought such a great man could only have lived a very
long time ago, and here he was after all almost as it were at our own
doors. This lent colour to the view that the Day of Judgement might
indeed be nearer than we had thought, but nurse said that was all right
now, and she knew. In those days the snow lay longer and drifted deeper
in the lanes than it does now, and the milk was sometimes brought in
frozen in winter, and we were taken down into the back kitchen to see it.
I suppose there are rectories up and down the country now where the milk
comes in frozen sometimes in winter, and the children go down to wonder
at it, but I never see any frozen milk in London, so I suppose the
winters are warmer than they used to be.

About one year after his wife's death Mr Pontifex also was gathered to
his fathers. My father saw him the day before he died. The old man had
a theory about sunsets