The Retrospect

It struck me, as I stood up in Mr B.'s carriage to look at the old house which had so well survived the changes and chances of half-a-century, that at the beginning of that half...

It was not a house or church, or wood or field, here or there, that swarmed with reminiscences of my life half-a-century ago; every bit of Norfolk soil that I passed over or loo...

It was the 17th August, and the weather the very best that England could do. Roses were still plentiful in the beautifully kept English gardens--Dorothy Perkins painted herself...

Twenty years ago--or was it nearer twenty-five?--a dear girl came to live with me as governess-out-of-school to my young children and general aide-de-camp to myself. It was in t...

Being in Devonshire I sat down on one of the most notoriously beautiful of all the beauty spots of the county. It was traditional that the old gentleman of the island who had ha...

I went on from D---- into the deeper and more beautiful recesses of my native county, the localities associated with my earliest years, the most sacred places of them all. It wa...

There is always one outstanding association to fly in your face ahead of every other when you encounter a thing or person once connected with your life, that has been severed fr...

I have been looking over a batch of new magazines, and the heading of a paper in one of them gives a sentence borrowed from a letter of Thomas Bailey Aldrich to William Dean How...

How beautiful England is! The home-stayers do not know it, nor the stranger within her gates. One must have been long enough absent from her in a sharply contrasting environment...

There was a gap of thirty-eight years, almost to a day, between my departure from England (1870), a five-weeks-old young bride, and my return thither (1908), an old woman. And f...

The second evening ashore saw us speeding out of London towards Cambridge and Ely, and beyond to the not-to-be-mentioned spot in the fens which represented the bosom of the fami...

The last time that I saw my old good grandfather, to whose old-time home M.G. and Mr B. drove me that July afternoon, was on a Sunday. It was just before we left T---- for D----...

There are people, and they seem to me the vast majority, who have no curiosity about or interest in anything or anywhere outside their business and domestic boundaries; who "wou...

There was another old home--an earlier one--that on my first walk in D---- I went to look at. Its associations were even more keenly dear, and archæologically it was immensely t...

All the Sundays of my childhood came to life again when, driving from T----, we passed the mouth of a grassy by-road, a little way down which stood the church of my earliest wor...