and trimming of fifty years, induced by the
requirements of several generations of sea-side
idlers, and all the whimsies that wealth can
bring about it.

So, as I said, I know the Cove better than
any other spot on earth, having struck root
there and twisted all the young elastic fibres of
my childish fancy round about its image; and
as often as I fall in with any one who knows my
old love only in her full-dressed matronhood, I
cannot help, if he will bear with my prosing,
trying to show her to him as I see her myself,
with all her wavy hills fresh as thymy green
turf and weather-stained grey limestone can
make them, to say nothing of her men and
women, whose presence starts up, whether I
please or no, in odd corners of the picture, and
smile pleasant recognition on me with eyes that
have, for the most part, seen their last of
daylight many a year ago.

There is no need of spell or vigil to evoke
such memories. Let me but wrap myself round,
as it were, close and soft, in the pearl-grey
mists of my native hill-sides, so as to shut out
the searching sunshine and the hard worldly
sights and sounds of a later time—and this
grows easier and easier to do as every year
rolls by—and I am sure to dream them back
again from the dead, those dear old homely
figures, and clasp hands with them once more
in their likeness as they lived.

First in my memories as in my affections
come worthy Captain Roger Vance, and Bella
his wife—so stand their names on the grey slab
close to the pathway, under the ancient
elm-trees of South Cove churchyard. Godpapa
Vance and Aunt Bella they always were for
me, though the only tie between us was that of
baptismal responsibilitv. I call him Captain
Vance because my little world of South Cove
always styled him so, though I believe he had
barely reached the grade of lieutenant when he
left the navy ever so many years before I knew
him. My father and he had been friends and
middies together on board his Majesty's frigate
Dreadnought in the blustering days of hard fighting
and hard swearing, press-gangs, long queues,
and general clashing Dutch concert of threatened
invasion and Rule Britannia. I have heard my
father say that Godpapa Vance never cared
greatly for his profession, and was not sorry to
be called home on his father's sudden death to
be a comfort and companion to his widowed
mother, whose only surviving child he was, and
who systematically worshipped and cosseted
him, till I think she must have laid the foundation
for a certain leaning towards valetudinarian
self-indulgence, and impatience of trifling
troubles, which made part of his nature when I
first took childish note of it. There stands
Godpapa Vance before me now unchanged—and
in all the years I knew him he never did seem
to change—a little quiet-voiced man, upwards
of threescore, and looking older than he was,
with a pinkish face lighted by pale blue eyes,
and dotted with small features of no particular
cut or expression. His head was small even
for his small figure, high-peaked in the crown,
and of such perfect polished baldness that I
remember how I used profanely to
long to try with my baby fingers whether it had
the coldness and hardness as it had the
glossiness of a china cup. What might have been
the colour of his hair I could not even guess,
for only a little thin fringe just above his shirt
collar was left, and that was purely white in my
time, whiter even than the grand powdered
toupet with which he was adorned in the gold-
mounted miniature Aunt Bella had of him in
his uniform, and which had belonged to the
Dowager Mrs. Vance, long since laid at rest.

Godpapa Vance especially affected capacious
garments. His black coats, trousers, and gaiters,
and stone-coloured kerseymere waistcoats, all
of superfine materials and scrupulously brushed,
were invariably of loose and baggy construction,
and made his corporeal bulk seem less than it
really was. A loose soft white handkerchief
encircled his throat and rested on the broad
snow-white frill of his shirt-front. He walked
with a slight limp, and a painful-seeming half
circular motion of the left foot at every step he
took, which obliged him to lean when out of
doors on a stout bamboo cane topped with
ivory. He himself never spoke to us children
about his lameness, but we knew for all that
how he had injured his foot many years before
in leaping down from a haystack on the projecting
iron prongs of a pitchfork, but I must say
that to me at least the possibility of such a
reckless feat seemed to involve matter so derogatory
to godpapa's dignity, that I had no small
misgivings as to the truth of the legend, and
considered his lameness as all the more mysterious.

After Captain Roger quitted the navy, and
left my father blazing away at the Mounseers
on board the Dreadnought, he and his lady
mother lived together for several years, I
fancy, in London, where she had a grim genteel
mansion in some long obsolete region of
propriety. Being sufficiently well born, well bred,
and well off" in the world, he managed to see
something of society in those years beyond what
encircled his doting mother's tea-table, with its
knot of demure old cronies, as unchangeable as
were its choice blue Nankin tea-service, the
gunpowder tea, crushed sugar-candy, and
subsequent pool at loo.

I know he was said to have mingled—even
to very perilous extent, so thought that thrice-
respectable junta—in a wild whirl of fashionable
revel, and to have played his part, a quiet
"walking gentleman's" part it must have been,
methinks, in many a gay slipshod reckless
masquerade of the wits and beauties of the
metropolis. The emigration was just then pouring
a very stampedo of questionable fooleries and
fripperies, not to say worse, into England, and
the said wits and beauties were busy draping
themselves in the tinselled second-hand
sentimentalisms just put off perforce on many a
reeking scaffold by their ill-fated brethren and
sisters of France. Still I do not think that
Godpapa Vance was much the worse on the whole