But though
the new town is to me a glass through which I look at the old, the
people I see passing up and down these wynds, sitting, nightcapped,
on their barrow-shafts, hobbling in their blacks to church on
Sunday, are less those I saw in my childhood than their fathers and
mothers who did these things in the same way when my mother was
young. I cannot picture the place without seeing her, as a little
girl, come to the door of a certain house and beat her bass against
the gav'le-end, or there is a wedding to-night, and the carriage
with the white-eared horse is sent for a maiden in pale blue, whose
bonnet-strings tie beneath the chin.
CHAPTER III - WHAT I SHOULD BE
My mother was a great reader, and with ten minutes to spare before
the starch was ready would begin the 'Decline and Fall' - and
finish it, too, that winter. Foreign words in the text annoyed her
and made her bemoan her want of a classical education - she had
only attended a Dame's school during some easy months - but she
never passed the foreign words by until their meaning was explained
to her, and when next she and they met it was as acquaintances,
which I think was clever of her. One of her delights was to learn
from me scraps of Horace, and then bring them into her conversation
with 'colleged men.' I have come upon her in lonely places, such
as the stair-head or the east room, muttering these quotations
aloud to herself, and I well remember how she would say to the
visitors, 'Ay, ay, it's very true, Doctor, but as you know, "Eheu
fugaces, Postume, Postume, labuntur anni,"' or 'Sal, Mr.
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