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family, and my grandfather's house was the London centre. All the family gathered there on each Christmastide, and on Christmas day was always held high festival. For long my brother and I were the only grandchildren within reach, and were naturally made much of. The two sons were out in India, married, with young families. The youngest daughter was much away from home, and a second was living in Constantinople, but three others lived with their father and mother. Bessie, the eldest of the whole family, was a woman of rigid honor and conscientiousness, but poverty and the struggle to keep out of debt had soured her, and
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Aunt Bessie was an object of dread, not of love. One story of her early life will best tell her character. She was engaged to a young clergyman, and one day when Bessie was at church he preached a sermon taken without acknowledgment from some old divine. The girl's keen sense of honor was shocked at the deception, and she broke off her engagement, but remained unmarried for the rest of her life.
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Careful and troubled about many things was poor Aunt Bessie, and I remember being rather shocked one day at hearing her express her sympathy with Martha, when her sister left her to serve alone, and at her saying:
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I doubt very much whether Jesus would have liked it if Martha had been lying about on the floor as well as Mary, and there had been no supper. But there! it's always those who do the work who are scolded, because they have not time to be as sweet and nice as those who do nothing. Nor could she ever approve of the treatment of the laborers in the parable, when those who
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received but the same wage as those that had worked but one hour.
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It was not just , she would say doggedly. A sad life was hers, for she repelled all sympathy, and yet later I had reason to believe that she half broke her heart because none loved her well. She was ever gloomy, unsympathising, carping, but she worked herself to death for those whose love she chillily repulsed. She worked till, denying herself every comfort, she literally dropped. One morning, when she got out of bed, she fell, and crawling into bed again, quietly said she could do no more; lay there for some months, suffering horribly with unvarying patience; and died, rejoicing that at last she would have
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Aunties were my playfellows, and I their pet. Minnie, a brilliant pianiste, earned a precarious livelihood by teaching music. The long fasts, the facing of all weathers, the weary rides in omnibuses with soaked feet, broke down at last a splendid constitution, and after some three years of torture, commencing with a sharp attack of English cholera, she died the year before my marriage. But during my girlhood she was the gayest and merriest of my friends, her natural buoyancy re-asserting itself whenever she could escape from her musical tread-mill. Great was my delight when she joined my mother and myself for our spring or summer trips, and when at my favorite St. Leonards--at the far unfashionable end, right away from the gay watering-place folk--we settled down for four or five happy weeks of sea and country, and when Minnie and I scampered over the country on horseback, merry as children set free from school. My other favorite auntie was of a quieter type, a soft pretty loving little woman.
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Co we called her, for she was
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, her father used to say. She was my mother's favorite sister, her
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, she would name her, because
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Co was so much her junior, and when she was a young girl the little child had been her charge.
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Always take care of little Co , was one of my mother's dying charges to me, and fortunately
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has--though the only one of my relatives who has done so--clung to me through change of faith, and through social ostracism. Her love for me, and her full belief that, however she differed from me, I meant right, have never varied, have never been shaken. She is intensely religious--as will be seen in the later story, wherein her life was much woven with mine--but however much
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views or actions might shock her, it is
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through it all;
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You are so good she said to me the last time I saw her, looking up at me with all her heart in her eyes;
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As though any, save a brute, could be aught but good to
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, whereas those in all the neighboring churches were
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. A Mr. Hoare, an intensely earnest man, was working there in most devoted fashion, and was glad to welcome any aid; we decorated his church, worked ornaments for it, and thought we were serving God when we were really amusing ourselves in a small place where our help was over-estimated, and where the clergy, very likely unconsciously, flattered us for our devotion. Among those who helped to carry on the services there, was a young undermaster of Stockwell Grammar School, the rev. Frank Besant, a Cambridge man, who had passed as 28th wrangler in his year, and who had just taken orders. At Easter we were again at Albert Square, and devoted much time to the little church, decking it on Easter Eve with soft yellow tufts of primrose blossom, and taking much delight in the unbounded admiration bestowed on the dainty spring blossoms by the poor who crowded in. I made a lovely white cross for the super-altar with camelias and azaleas and white geraniums, but after all it was not really as spring-like, as suitable for a
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Resurrection
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. I had read Pusey's book on
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Daniel the prophet , and, knowing nothing of the criticisms he attacked, I felt triumphant at his convincing demonstrations of their error, and felt sure that none but the wilfully blind could fail to see how weak were the arguments of the heretic writers. That stately preface of his was one of my favorite pieces of reading, and his dignified defence against all novelties of
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, at once charmed and satisfied me. The delightful vagueness of Stanley, which just suited my mother's broad views, because it _was_ vague and beautiful, was denounced by Pusey--not unwarrantably-- as that
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. When she would bid me not be uncharitable to those with whom I differed in matters of religion, I would answer in his words, that
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, and that to speak out the truth unwaveringly as it was revealed, was alone
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Holy Week of 1866 approached. In order to facilitate the realisation of those last sacred days of God incarnate on earth, working out man's salvation, I resolved to write a brief history of that week, compiled from the four gospels, meaning then to try and realise each day the occurrences that had happened on the corresponding date in A.D. 33, and so to follow those
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Taught daily | | | in the Temple . | | | | MONDAY. | MONDAY. | MONDAY. | MONDAY. | | | Cursed the fig | Cursed the fig | Like Matthew. | tree. Taught in | tree. Purified | | the Temple, and | the Temple. | | spake many | Went out of | | parables. No | city. | | breaks shown, | | | but the fig tree | | | (xxi., 19) did | | | not wither till | | | Tuesday (see | | | Mark). | | | | | | TUESDAY. | TUESDAY. | TUESDAY. | TUESDAY. | | | All chaps, xxi., | Saw fig tree | Discourses. No | 20, xxii.-xxv., | withered up. | date shown. | spoken on Tues- | Then discourses.| | day, for xxvi., 2 | | | gives Passover as | | |