I. Coming Home II. About Town III. In Beautiful England IV. The Home of Childhood V. Halcyon Days VI. Earliest Recollections VII. Old Times and New VIII. Some Early Sundays IX. My Grandfather's Days X. Outdoor Life XI. At the Seaside XII. Excursions to Sandringham XIII. A Trip South XIV. "Devon, Glorious Devon!" XV. In the Garden of England...

There was a gap of thirty-eight years, almost to a day, between my departure from England (1870), a five-weeks-old young bride, and my return thither (1908), an old woman. And for about seven-eighths of that long time in Australia, while succeeding very well in making the best of things, I was never without a subconscious sense of exile, a chronic nostalgia, that could hardly bear the sight of a homeward-bound ship. This often-tantalised but ever-unappeased desire to be back in my native land wo

How beautiful England is! The home-stayers do not know it, nor the stranger within her gates. One must have been long enough absent from her in a sharply contrasting environment to have become an outsider, a cosmopolitan connoisseur, while still not an alien but native to her soil—at any rate, imbued with her maternal influence—to appreciate her consummate charm. I think that Australians and Americans, her elder and younger offspring, who have so many points of view in common, do so more fully t

The second evening ashore saw us speeding out of London towards Cambridge and Ely, and beyond to the not-to-be-mentioned spot in the fens which represented the bosom of the family—G.'s family, that is to say, for England held no more trace of mine. I saw prettier English landscapes afterwards, from the windows of railway carriages, but this first picture of the green country was overwhelmingly beautiful to my eyes. I had forgotten what the country grass was like, and the country trees. Our "Engl

There was another old home—an earlier one—that on my first walk in D—— I went to look at. Its associations were even more keenly dear, and archæologically it was immensely the most interesting. I was astonished to see how very, very old it was, and for the first time was curious about its evidently extensive history. There was a monastic suggestion in its thick walls and crow-stepped gables, and the oaken door exactly like a church door, and the peculiar irregularity of the grouping of its parts

There is always one outstanding association to fly in your face ahead of every other when you encounter a thing or person once connected with your life, that has been severed from it for a long time. And when I looked at the front door like a church door, simultaneously apprehending its interesting character as a door, the first thing I thought of was—valentines. The word says nothing to my youthful reader. But, oh, dear contemporary for whom especially I write, you who took part with me in thos

I went on from D—— into the deeper and more beautiful recesses of my native county, the localities associated with my earliest years, the most sacred places of them all. It was early in July, when the rhododendrons, so thick in the woods, had done their flowering, but the trees were in full perfection, and the honeysuckles of the hedges scented the highways. Two large families of cousins had grown up thereabouts, and some were still clinging to their native soil. All had been unknown to me from

It struck me, as I stood up in Mr B.'s carriage to look at the old house which had so well survived the changes and chances of half-a-century, that at the beginning of that half-century the cash cost of happiness was very much lighter than it is at the end; and not the cash cost of happiness only, but of material well-being, domestic plenty, social position, everything necessary to the comfort and dignity of a gentleman. I do not speak of the poor labouring class; I do not say—I do not for a mom

All the Sundays of my childhood came to life again when, driving from T——, we passed the mouth of a grassy by-road, a little way down which stood the church of my earliest worshippings. We were due to drink tea at my grandfather's old home, now occupied by one of his great-grandsons, and had scant time for more lingerings on the way if we were to keep our appointment punctually; but the sight of the familiar square, squat tower was too much for me, and I said to M. and Mr B.: "Oh, I must, I must

The last time that I saw my old good grandfather, to whose old-time home M.G. and Mr B. drove me that July afternoon, was on a Sunday. It was just before we left T—— for D——, where we were living when he died. By the same token I remember the night of the event, when we sat in the music-room with servants (taking care of us in the absence of our parents at his bedside), and how the girls made our flesh creep by telling how Rover had howled and death-watches had ticked in the walls, and winding-s

It was not a house or church, or wood or field, here or there, that swarmed with reminiscences of my life half-a-century ago; every bit of Norfolk soil that I passed over or looked upon was thick with history of the old times. I had been so sure that the March of Progress, which in the same period had made a highly modern nation out of nothing on the other side of the world, would have swept away the wild-blooming hedgerows, the divisions of the little fields, the rutty, grassy, tree-shaded lane

I have been looking over a batch of new magazines, and the heading of a paper in one of them gives a sentence borrowed from a letter of Thomas Bailey Aldrich to William Dean Howells, which I will borrow again for an opening to this chapter: "I've a theory that every author while living has a projection of himself, a sort of eidolon, that goes about in near and distant places and makes friends and enemies for him out of folk who never knew him in the flesh. When the author dies this phantom fades

I had a day of days before I left H——. It was the 17th August, and the weather the very best that England could do. Roses were still plentiful in the beautifully kept English gardens—Dorothy Perkins painted herself on the landscape far and near—and mauve and purple clematis foamed over tawny house walls in delicious contrast of colour, with as little reserve as in our more ardently wooing air. A favourite ribbon-work of the little dark blue campanula was noticeable everywhere, bordering flower-b

There are people, and they seem to me the vast majority, who have no curiosity about or interest in anything or anywhere outside their business and domestic boundaries; who "wouldn't cross the street," as they say, to look at the Parthenon or the Sphinx, or see anything in them if they did; to whom a guide-book, with photographs, means a map and a railway time-table and an indicator of the tariffs of different hotels. But the passion for travel—to "see the world"—has possessed me from my youth u

Twenty years ago—or was it nearer twenty-five?—a dear girl came to live with me as governess-out-of-school to my young children and general aide-de-camp to myself. It was in the time, which spread over so many years, when I was not strong enough for all the domestic duties that properly belonged to me. I got her through an advertisement—the only time I was ever beholden to such a source for such an acquisition. "A young English lady" was the attractive description of her—the very thing, to my mi