r dark. I had been tormented the whole way down by a nervous fear
that I should not know my mother's face again; an absence of three
years, of course, could not justify such an apprehension, but it had
completely taken possession of my imagination and was causing me much
distress, when, as the coach stopped in the dark at the village inn, I
heard the words, "Is there any one here for Mrs. Kemble?" uttered in a
voice which I knew so well, that I sprang, hat and all, into my mother's
arms, and effectually got rid of my fear that I should not know her.

Her rural yearnings had now carried her beyond her suburban refuge at
Craven Hill, and she was infinitely happy, in her small cottage
habitation, on the outskirts of Weybridge and the edge of its
picturesque common. Tiny, indeed, it was, and but for her admirable
power of contrivance could hardly have held us with any comfort; but she
delighted in it, and so did we all except my father, who, like most men,
had no real taste for the country; the men who appear to themselves and
others to like it confounding their love for hunting and shooting with
that of the necessary field of their sports. Anglers seem to me to be
the only sportsmen who really have a taste for and love of nature as
well as for fishy water. At any rate, the silent, solitary, and
comparatively still character of their pursuit enables them to study and
appreciate beauty of scenery more than the violent exercise and
excitement of fox-hunting, whatever may be said in favor of the
picturesque influences of beating preserves and wading through
turnip-fields with keepers and companions more or less congenial.

Of deer-stalking and grouse-shooting I do not speak; a man who does not
become enthusiastic in his admiration of wild scenery while following
these sports must have but half the use of his eyes.

Perhaps it was hardly fair to expect my father to relish extremely a
residence where he was as nearly as possible too high and too wide, too
long and too large, for every room in the house. He used to come down on
Saturday and stay till Monday morning, but the rest of the week he spent
at what was then our home in London, No. 5 Soho Square; it was a
handsome, comfortable, roomy house, and has now, I think, been converted
into a hospital.

The little cottage at Weybridge was covered at the back with a vine,
which bore with the utmost luxuriance a small, black, sweet-water grape,
from which, I remember, one year my