Project Gutenberg's In the Days of My Youth, by Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards

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Title: In the Days of My Youth

Author: Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards

Release Date: May 26, 2004 [EBook #12442]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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IN THE

DAYS OF MY YOUTH.

A NOVEL.

BY
AMELIA B. EDWARDS

1874

[Illustration]

CAXTON PRESS OF
SHERMAN & CO., PHILADELPHIA.

CHAPTER I.

MY BIRTHPLACE AND PARENTAGE.

Dolce sentier,
Colle, che mi piacesti,
Ov'ancor per usanza amor mi mena!

PETRARCH.

Sweet, secluded, shady Saxonholme! I doubt if our whole England contains
another hamlet so quaint, so picturesquely irregular, so thoroughly
national in all its rustic characteristics. It lies in a warm hollow
environed by hills. Woods, parks and young plantations clothe every
height and slope for miles around, whilst here and there, peeping down
through green vistas, or towering above undulating seas of summer
foliage, stands many a fine old country mansion, turreted and gabled,
and built of that warm red brick that seems to hold the light of the
sunset long after it has faded from the rest of the landscape. A silver
thread of streamlet, swift but shallow, runs noisily through the meadows
beside the town and loses itself in the Chad, about a mile and a half
farther eastward. Many a picturesque old wooden bridge, many a foaming
weir and ruinous water-mill with weedy wheel, may be found scattered up
and down the wooded banks of this little river Chad; while to the brook,
which we call the Gipstream, attaches a vague tradition of trout.

The hamlet itself is clean and old-fashioned, consisting of one long,
straggling street, and a few tributary lanes and passages. The houses
some few years back were mostly long and low-fronted, with projecting
upper stories, and diamond-paned bay-windows bowered in with myrtle and
clematis; but modern improvements have done much of late to sweep away
these antique tenements, and a fine new suburb of Italian and Gothic
vill