ot long
before my father came to Paleham, he had taken a farm of about ninety
acres, thus making a considerable rise in life. Along with the farm
there went an old-fashioned but comfortable house with a charming garden
and an orchard. The carpenter's business was now carried on in one of
the outhouses that had once been part of some conventual buildings, the
remains of which could be seen in what was called the Abbey Close. The
house itself, embosomed in honeysuckles and creeping roses, was an
ornament to the whole village, nor were its internal arrangements less
exemplary than its outside was ornamental. Report said that Mrs Pontifex
starched the sheets for her best bed, and I can well believe it.

How well do I remember her parlour half filled with the organ which her
husband had built, and scented with a withered apple or two from the
_pyrus japonica_ that grew outside the house; the picture of the prize ox
over the chimney-piece, which Mr Pontifex himself had painted; the
transparency of the man coming to show light to a coach upon a snowy
night, also by Mr Pontifex; the little old man and little old woman who
told the weather; the china shepherd and shepherdess; the jars of
feathery flowering grasses with a peacock's feather or two among them to
set them off, and the china bowls full of dead rose leaves dried with bay
salt. All has long since vanished and become a memory, faded but still
fragrant to myself.

Nay, but her kitchen--and the glimpses into a cavernous cellar beyond it,
wherefrom came gleams from the pale surfaces of milk cans, or it may be
of the arms and face of a milkmaid skimming the cream; or again her
storeroom, where among other treasures she kept the famous lipsalve which
was one of her especial glories, and of which she would present a shape
yearly to those whom she delighted to honour. She wrote out the recipe
for this and gave it to my mother a year or two before she died, but we
could never make it as she did. When we were children she used sometimes
to send her respects to my mother, and ask leave for us to come and take
tea with her. Right well she used to ply us. As for her temper, we
never met such a delightful old lady in our lives; whatever Mr Pontifex
may have had to put up with, we had no cause for complaint, and then Mr
Pontifex would play to us upon the organ, and we would stand round him
open-mouthed and think him the most wonderfully clever man that ever was
born, except