A Writers Recollections, vol 1 | Page 9

in Laura Fountain's inbred, and finally indomitable, resistance to the Catholic claim upon the will and intellect of men.
And to this trial in the realm of religious feeling there were added all the practical difficulties into which my father's action plunged her and his children. The Tasmanian appointment had to be given up, for the feeling in the colony was strongly anti-Catholic; and we came home, as I have described, to a life of struggle, privation, and constant anxiety, in which my mother suffered not only for herself, but for her children.
But, after all, there were bright spots. My father and mother were young; my mother's eager, sympathetic temper brought her many friends; and for us children, Fox How and its dear inmates opened a second home, and new joys, which upon myself in particular left impressions never to be effaced or undone. Let me try and describe that house and garden and those who lived in it, as they were in 1856.

CHAPTER II
FOX HOW
The gray-stone house stands now, as it stood then, on a "how" or rising ground in the beautiful Westmorland valley leading from Ambleside to Rydal. The "Doctor" built it as a holiday paradise for himself and his children, in the year 1833. It is a modest building, with ten bedrooms and three sitting-rooms. Its windows look straight into the heart of Fairfield, the beautiful semicircular mountain which rears its hollowed front and buttressing scaurs against the north, far above the green floor of the valley. That the house looked north never troubled my grandfather or his children. What they cared for was the perfect outline of the mountain wall, the "pensive glooms," hovering in that deep breast of Fairfield, the magic never-ending chase of sunlight and cloud across it on fine days, and the beauty of the soft woodland clothing its base. The garden was his children's joy as it became mine. Its little beck with its mimic bridges, its encircling river, its rocky knolls, its wild strawberries and wild raspberries, its queen of birch-trees rearing a stately head against the distant mountain, its rhododendrons growing like weeds on its mossy banks, its velvet turf, and long silky grass in the parts left wild--all these things have made the joy of three generations.
Inside, Fox How was comfortably spacious, and I remember what a palace it appeared to my childish eyes, fresh from the tiny cabin of a 400-ton sailing-ship, and the rough life of a colony. My grandmother, its mistress, was then sixty-one. Her beautiful hair was scarcely touched with gray, her complexion was still delicately clear, and her soft brown eyes had the eager, sympathetic look of her Cornish race. Charlotte Bront?, who saw her a few years earlier, while on a visit to Miss Martineau, speaks of her as having been a "very pretty woman," and credits her and her daughters with "the possession of qualities the most estimable and endearing." In another letter, however, written to a less familiar correspondent, to whom Miss Bront?, as the literary lady with a critical reputation to keep up, expresses herself in a different and more artificial tone, she again describes my grandmother as good and charming, but doubts her claim to "power and completeness of character." The phrase occurs in a letter describing a call at Fox How, and its slight pomposity makes the contrast with the passage in which Matthew Arnold describes the same visit the more amusing.
At seven came Miss Martineau, and Miss Bront? (Jane Eyre); talked to Miss Martineau (who blasphemes frightfully) about the prospects of the Church of England, and, wretched man that I am, promised to go and see her cow-keeping miracles to-morrow, I who hardly know a cow from a sheep. I talked to Miss Bront? (past thirty and plain, with expressive gray eyes, though) of her curates, of French novels, and her education in a school at Brussels, and sent the lions roaring to their dens at half-past nine.
No one, indeed, would have applied the word "power" to my grandmother, unless he had known her very well. The general impression was always one of gentle sweetness and soft dignity. But the phrase, "completeness of character," happens to sum up very well the impression left by her life both on kindred and friends. What Miss Bront? exactly meant by it it is difficult to say. But the widowed mother of nine children, five of them sons, and all of them possessed of strong wills and quick intelligence, who was able so to guide their young lives that to her last hour, thirty years after her husband's death had left her alone with her task, she possessed their passionate reverence and affection, and that each and all of them would have acknowledged her as among the dearest and noblest influences in