Two Suffolk Friends | Page 4

That afternoon my
grandfather and grandmother were sitting in the summer-house, and she
told him of the mishap and its punishment. "Stupid child!" said my
grandfather; "why, I could get through there myself." He tried, and he
too tore his small- clothes, but he was not sent to bed.
With his elder brother, John Hindes (afterwards Rector of Earl Soham),
my father went to school at Norwich under Valpy. The first time my
grandfather drove them, a forty-mile drive; and when they came in
sight of the cathedral spire, he pulled up, and they all three fell
a-weeping. For my grandfather was a tender-hearted man, moved to
tears by the Waverley novels. Of Valpy my father would tell how once
he had flogged a day-boy, whose father came the next day to complain
of his severity. "Sir," said Valpy, "I flogged your son because he richly
deserved it. If he again deserves it, I shall again flog him.
And"--rising--"if you come here, sir, interfering with my duty, sir, I
shall flog you." The parent fled.
The following story I owe to an old schoolfellow of my father's, the
Rev. William Drake. "Among the lower boys," he writes, "were a
brother of mine, somewhat of a pickle, and a classmate of his, who in
after years blossomed into a Ritualistic clergyman, and who was the
son of a gentleman, living in the Lower Close, not remarkable for
personal beauty. One morning, as he was coming up the school, the
sound of weeping reached old Valpy's ears: straightway he stopped to
investigate whence it proceeded. 'Stand up, sir,' he cried in a voice of
thunder, for he hated snivelling; 'what is the matter with you?' 'Please,
sir,' came the answer, much interrupted by sobs and tears, 'Bob Drake
says I'm uglier than my father, and that my father is as ugly as the
Devil.'"
Another old Norwich story may come in here, of two middle-aged
brothers, Jeremiah and Ozias, the sons of a dead composer, and
themselves performers on the pianoforte. At a party one evening

Jeremiah had just played something, when Ozias came up and asked
him, "Brother Jerry, what was that beastly thing you were playing?"
"Ozias, it was our father's," was the reproachful answer; and Ozias
burst into tears.
{Monk Soham Rectory: p14.jpg}
When my father went up to Cambridge, his father went with him, and
introduced him to divers old dons, one of whom offered him this sage
advice, "Stick to your quadratics, young man. I got my fellowship
through my quadratics." Another, the mathematical lecturer at
Peterhouse, was a Suffolk man, and spoke broad Suffolk. One day he
was lecturing on mechanics, and had arranged from the lecture-room
ceiling a system of pulleys, which he proceeded to explain,--"Yeou see,
I pull this string; it will turn this small wheel, and then the next wheel,
and then the next, and then will raise that heavy weight at the end." He
pulled--nothing happened. He pulled again--still no result. "At least ta
should," he remarked.
Music engrossed, I fancy, a good deal of my father's time at Cambridge.
He saw much of Mrs Frere of Downing, a pupil of a pupil of Handel's.
Of her he has written in the Preface to FitzGerald's 'Letters.' He was a
member of the well-known "Camus"; and it was he (so the late Sir
George Paget informed my doctor-brother) who settled the dispute as to
precedence between vocalists and instrumentalists with the apt
quotation, "The singers go before, the minstrels follow after." He was
an instrumentalist himself, his instrument the 'cello; and there was a
story how he, the future Master of Trinity, and some brother musicians
were proctorised one night, as they were returning from a festive
meeting, each man performing on his several instrument.
He was an attendant at the debates at the Cambridge Union, e.g., at the
one when the question debated was, "Will Mr Coleridge's poem of 'The
Ancient Mariner' or Mr Martin's Act tend most to prevent cruelty to
animals?" The voting was, for Mr Martin 5, for Mr Coleridge 47; and
"only two" says a note written by my father in 1877, "of the seven who
took part in the debate are now living--Lord Houghton and the Dean of
Lincoln. How many still remember kind and civil Baxter, the

harness-maker opposite Trinity; and how many of them ever heard him
sing his famous song of 'Poor Old Horse'? Yet for pathos, and,
unhappily in some cases, for truth, it may well rank even with 'The
Ancient Mariner.' And Baxter used to sing it so tenderly."
Meanwhile, of the Earl Soham life--a life not unlike that of
"Raveloe"--my father had much to tell. There was the Book Club, with
its meetings at the "Falcon," where, in the words of a local