A Writers Recollections, vol 1 | Page 2

be told, I think, that does not interest or kindle one's own mind in looking back; it is the only condition on which one can hope to interest or kindle other minds. And this means that one ought to handle things broadly, taking only the salient points in the landscape of the past, and of course with as much detachment as possible. Though probably in the end one will have to admit--egotists that we all are!--that not much detachment is possible.
For me, the first point that stands out is the arrival of a little girl of five, in the year 1856, at a gray-stone house in a Westmorland valley, where, fourteen years earlier, the children of Arnold of Rugby, the "Doctor" of _Tom Brown's Schooldays_, had waited on a June day, to greet their father, expected from the South, only to hear, as the summer day died away, that two hours' sharp illness, that very morning, had taken him from them. Of what preceded my arrival as a black-haired, dark-eyed child, with my father, mother, and two brothers, at Fox How, the holiday house among the mountains which the famous headmaster had built for himself in 1834, I have but little recollection. I see dimly another house in wide fields, where dwarf lilies grew, and I know that it was a house in Tasmania, where at the time of my birth my father, Thomas Arnold, the Doctor's second son, was organizing education in the young colony. I can just recall, too, the deck of a ship which to my childish feet seemed vast--but the William Brown was a sailing-ship of only 400 tons!--in which we made the voyage home in 1856. Three months and a half we took about it, going round the Horn in bitter weather, much run over by rats at night, and expected to take our baths by day in two huge barrels full of sea water on the deck, into which we children were plunged shivering by our nurse, two or three times a week. My father and mother, their three children, and some small cousins, who were going to England under my mother's care, were the only passengers.
I can remember, too, being lifted--weak and miserable with toothache--in my father's arms to catch the first sight of English shores as we neared the mouth of the Thames; and then the dismal inn by the docks where we first took shelter. The dreary room where we children slept the first night, its dingy ugliness and its barred windows, still come back to me as a vision of horror. Next day, like angels of rescue, came an aunt and uncle, who took us away to other and cheerful quarters, and presently saw us off to Westmorland. The aunt was my godmother, Doctor Arnold's eldest daughter--then the young wife of William Edward Forster, a Quaker manufacturer, who afterward became the well-known Education Minister of 1870, and was Chief Secretary for Ireland in the terrible years 1880-82.
To my mother and her children, Fox How and its inmates represented much that was new and strange. My mother was the granddaughter of one of the first Governors of Tasmania, Governor Sorell, and had been brought up in the colony, except for a brief schooling at Brussels. Of her personal beauty in youth we children heard much, as we grew up, from her old Tasmanian friends and kinsfolk who would occasionally drift across us; and I see as though I had been there a scene often described to me--my mother playing Hermione in the "Winter's Tale," at Government House when Sir William Denison was Governor--a vision, lovely and motionless, on her pedestal, till at the words, "Music! awake her! Strike!" she kindled into life. Her family were probably French in origin. Governor Sorell had been a man of promise in his youth. His father, General William Alexander Sorell, of the Coldstream Guards, was a soldier of some eminence, whose two sons, William and Thomas, both served under Sir John Moore and at the Cape. But my great-grandfather ruined his military career, while he was Deputy Adjutant-General at the Cape, by a love-affair with a brother officer's wife, and was banished or promoted--whichever one pleases to call it--to the new colony of Tasmania, of which he became Governor in 1816. His eldest son, by the wife he had left behind him in England, went out as a youth of twenty-one or so, to join his father, the Governor, in Tasmania, and I possess a little calf-bound diary of my grandfather written in a very delicate and refined hand, about the year 1823. The faint entries in it show him to have been a devoted son. But when, in 1830 or so, the Governor left the colony, and retired to Brussels, my grandfather remained in