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and creep over the well. In the act of doing this I was seen by Mrs Catton, who saved me, perhaps, from falling down the well, and carried me home, detailing the great escape. Well do I remember, not so much the whipping, as the being shut up in a dark closet behind the study. So strong was and is the mpression, that, on visiting Rendlesham as archdeacon, when I was sixty years old, on going up to the rectory-house I asked especially to see this dark closet. There it was, dark and unchanged since fifty-six years ago; and at the sight of it I had no comfortable recollection, nor have I now.

"In the year 1814 was a great feast on the Green—a rejoicing for the peace. One thing still sticks to my memory, and that is the figure of Mrs Sheming, a farmer's wife. She was a very large woman, and wore a tight-fitting white dress, with a blue ribbon round her waist, on which was printed 'Peace and Plenty.'

"In the year 1815 we spent the summer in London, in a house in Brunswick Square, which overlooked the grounds of the Foundling Hospital. Three events of that year have always remained impressed on my memory. The first was the death of little Mary,our only sister. She must have been a strangely precocious child, since at barely three years old she could wellnigh read. My mother, who died fifty-two years after in her eighty-third year, on each year when Mary's death came round took out her clothes, kept so long, and, after airing them, put them away in their own drawer. The second event, which I well remember, was being taken out to see the illuminations for the battle of Waterloo. I can perfectly remember the face of Somerset House, all ablaze with coloured lamps. The third event was the funeral of a poor girl named Elizabeth Fenning."^[1]

And there those childish reminiscences broke off—never to be resumed. But from recollections of my father's talk—and he loved to talk of the past—I will attempt to write what he himself might have written; no set biography, but just the old household tales.

After the visit to London the family lived a while at Wickham Market, where my father saw the long strings of tumbrils, laden with Waterloo wounded, on their way from Yarmouth to London. Then in 1818 they settled at Earl Soham, my grandfather having become rector of that parish and Monk Soham. His father, Robinson Groome, the sea-captain, had purchased the advowson of the two conjoint livings from the Rev. Francis Capper (1735-1818), whose long tenure^[2] of them was cele-

1. ↑ She was hanged on 26th June 1815 for attempting to poison her master's family; and her story, reprinted from 'Maga,' forms a chapter in Paget's 'Paradoxes and Puzzles' (1874). That chapter I read, to my father the summer before his death. It disappointed him, for he had always cherished the popular belief in her innocence.
2. ↑ I am reminded of a case, long afterwards, where a clergyman had obtained a wealthy living on the condition that the retiring rector should, so long as he lived, receive nearly half the tithes. An aged man at the time the bargain was struck, that rector lived on and on for close upon twenty years; and his successor would ever and again come over to see my father, and ask his "advice." "What could I advise?" said my father; "for we live in Suffolk, not Venice, so a bravo is out of the question."