Page:Early Reminiscences.djvu/189

Rh one occasion for some misdemeanour or other I was shut into the small parlour. After a period of screams and howls ensued a tract of silence. My mother said to her sister, "You may depend upon it, he is after some mischief."

They opened the door and found that I was actively engaged in tearing down the wall-paper as far as I could reach.

Nor was I sympathetic, nor particularly reverential. One day, when we were at Bratton my father drove my mother over to Lew House to see his mother and father; and I was seated at their feet in the gig. In descending Lew Hill, the horse trod on a rolling stone and fell. Thereupon my father and mother shot like a pair of rockets over my head and the splash-board and fell into the road. I burst out laughing. My father was very angry with me, and my mother looked distressed. When reproached, I said:

"I could not help it, you both looked like rooks taking flight from a field where you had been feeding."

"You bad, unprincipled boy," said my father wrathfully, "we might both have broken our necks."

"Oh, then I should have cried and not laughed."

"But, my dear," put in my mother, "it was so rude of you to say we were like rooks."

"I love rooks," I said.

I have gone back many years. At the time when this accident occurred I was but five or six years old.

Just fifty years after this I was driving my wife down the same hill in a dog-cart, when I told her this story. I had hardly concluded, when—bother it!—at the same place down went the horse, and I shot out.

No bones were broken, but the knees of my trousers were horribly lacerated. None who have not formed such an attachment can comprehend how lovable an old pair of trousers may be to one. As I was contemplating the rents, I heard my wife laugh, and I looked up half-reproachfully, half-angrily.

"You really looked like an old crow taking flight," said she mischievously. But, observing that I was not placated, with one of her pleasant smiles, she added: "I love an old crow."

There were sights and sounds of country life at this period that have passed away, never to return. One of the sounds was