Читать книгу What the Judge Saw: Being Twenty-Five Years in Manchester by One Who Has Done It - Edward Abbott Sir Parry - Страница 5

It may be a hut with a thatch on

In a garden where roses grow,

Or built of bad bricks with a patch on

Of stucco, and twelve in a row;

It may be a palace of crystal,

With a splendid sparkling dome,

But what does it matter whatever it is,

It is Home.

“Pater’s Book of Rhymes.”

I do not want to anger my readers at the threshold with heraldic learning of the couching lions and ramping cats to which the Parrys of Nerquis are by right entitled, but I claim a Welshman’s privilege of setting down so much of genealogy as is necessary to the understanding of my story. And truly one of the temptations that lured me to this task was a desire to write down what I could remember of my father, John Humffreys Parry—​Serjeant Parry—​who died more than thirty years ago, and left so fine a memory among his comrades in the battles of old in Westminster Hall.

And I often heard my father talk of his Welsh ancestry, though he himself was a Londoner born in 1816, and he would tell us what he remembered of his father, John Humffreys Parry, the Welsh antiquary and writer who was called to the Bar in 1811, and died when my father was a boy of sixteen. He was the writer of the “Cambrian Plutarch” and editor of the “Cambro Briton,” a journal of Celtic folk-lore and the ancient literature and history of Wales. Nowadays he would probably have been a professor at a Welsh University, but in those days people cared for none of these things. I remember reading in some Welsh account of his career—​and among Welshmen he is far better known than my father—​how he was educated at Mold Grammar School and articled to Mr. Wynne, solicitor, of that town, and married a daughter of John Thomas, solicitor, of Llanfyllin, which is away down in the wilds of Montgomeryshire. This biographer wound up his story with the compendious statement that “he went to London, was called to the Bar, took to literature and dissipated his estates.” But if he had any estates, which is at least doubtful, he wasted them not in riotous living, but in the printing and publishing of the Welsh literature he loved. From the earliest he was an eager and ready writer. I have a small brown scrapbook, the leaves of which are saffron-tinged with age, in which are pasted with proud care the author’s letters and verses contributed to the Chester Courant in the early part of the century, when he was a youth in Mr. Wynne’s office in Mold.

Some years ago curiosity led me into the land of my forefathers, and I climbed the steep hill between Mold and Ruthin to reach Llanferres, going past “The Three Loggerheads,” the sign of which Richard Wilson, R.A., the landscape painter, is reputed to have painted. It is the old jest of two heads grinning at you—​the third you supply for yourself. And if Wilson painted it, as they say he did, it was probably done in his early days, for he came from Mold, and as he died in 1782 the sign must have been there in my great-grandfather Edward Parry’s time, when he became rector of the little hill village of Llanferres in 1790. And doubtless he often saw it as he walked down the hill to visit his wife’s relatives in Mold, or went across to Nerquis to see his father Edward Parry, the tanner.

And at Llanferres I searched the church registers, and finding that the rector was carried home to his native village of Nerquis, I turned my steps along the narrow roads down the side of the hill where his funeral must have passed and found a little village church at the foot-hills on the English side, so much away from the bustle of the world’s traffic that I think it must be much the same to-day as it was when my great-grandfather was carried back to his early home. And when the little churchyard of Nerquis gives up its collection of Parrys it will relinquish a goodly number who lived and died in this quiet, solitary place, and from what one reads on marble slabs and the like, they were a godly, honest and well-doing people. But to my regret I find that Edward the tanner’s father was the Rev. Canon Edward Parry, M.A., Vicar of Oswestry in 1763, and his father was Thomas, an attorney of Welshpool who lived near the bridge, so that as we reach the seventeenth century it dawns upon me that I do not belong to North Wales at all, and I cease my researches into the past, in dread that I should discover after all that I am no better than a South Wales man, a “Hwntw” in good northern speech, or “man from beyond.”

My very earliest personal recollection of my father was in the days of my childhood, when we lived at No. 1, Upper Gloucester Place, overlooking Dorset Square. In the interests of the committee of the society that busies itself placing decorative lozenges on the birth-places of the famous it is well to record that I have it on hearsay evidence that this is where I was born.

I can well remember, and as it were visualise, my father in that house, but only on one day of the week—​the Sunday. On other days I cannot remember to have seen him at all. But I can recall many details of the house itself, and well remember that the library window looked on to New Street, in which lived our chemist and druggist; and of an evening I would go into the library and climb on a chair to enjoy the glory of his huge coloured bottles in the window, and then meanly pull faces at the nauseous shop in revenge for the wrongs I had suffered at its hands.

My brother and I took our morning walks in Dorset Square. In the early sixties Dorset Square was a vast jungle. Speaking from memory, it contained well-accredited lions and bears in its fastnesses. I saw Dorset Square the other day. It has sadly shrunk. Those giant shrubs that towered over your head, hiding you securely from a distracted nurse, are no longer there. Regent’s Park was my other playground or, rather, that part of it opposite Sussex Terrace called “The Enclosure,” to which we had a right of entrance and a key. I do not know that it is a matter of importance now, but it was of the essence of happiness in those days that our good nurse ex abundanti cautela carried the key of “The Enclosure” in one hand, and my brother and I contested for her other hand, as a prize of great worth. Regent’s Park retains more of its size than Dorset Square, but it is not the illimitable veldt that it was. “The Enclosure” was snobbish, and its snobbery has been very properly curtailed. I well remember how we envied the nurseless urchins in their freedom of the real park across the water. It was on that treacherous lake some forty people were drowned in a terrible ice accident. I remember being hurried out of “The Enclosure” past the tent into which they were carrying the drowned. For many months afterwards there was the draining, levelling, and then the refilling of the lake. All this work I superintended from the banks, and at last watched the water come bubbling up from a huge pipe into the new-made lake with as deep a satisfaction as the chief engineer himself.

But in all these childhood’s scenes I do not recall that my father had any part. He was, of course, at this time a very hard-worked man, but Sunday morning he always devoted to his children. I can picture his solid, kindly face and see his commanding figure wrapped in a dressing-gown of many colours—​an old friend—​as he sat at the end of the breakfast-table when we were brought down from the nursery. The only other member of the party was Tiger, a favourite tabby cat of whom my father was very proud. He had a great love of cats, and at one time possessed three, which he named Hic, Hæc, and Hoc. The appositeness of the names came to me with the Latin grammar and years of discretion. Two journals were his Sabbath reading—The Spectator and Athenæum, but he laid down his paper when we arrived, and took that real interest in our affairs which is the only key to children’s hearts. One great task was the skilful arrangement of all the animals of Noah’s Ark on the breakfast-table, which was rewarded with buttered toast. In a spirit of fairness Tiger was requested to walk among the animals. This if he did without mishap earned him the guerdon of cream. Then there was a careful examination on our weekly studies of the pages of Punch, which my father held rightly to be the earliest nursery text-book of history and sociology for the English child. This was followed by dramatic recitals of Mr. Southey’s “Three Bears” and some of Jane and Ann Taylor’s original poems, and other childhood’s sagas. And then when the nurse’s fateful knock was heard at the door to take the young gentlemen for a walk, off went my father’s huge dressing-gown, two wildly excited urchins sprang into the limitless depths of the arm-chair and were covered up by the garment, and my father with dramatic breathlessness shouted “Come in!” and was “discovered”—​to use a phrase of the theatre—​calmly reading the paper at the table. The same dialogue was always maintained. The nurse inquired where the children were; the father expressed his astonishment at their disappearance; Tiger was asked if he had seen them, and remained silent. Then an elaborate search with hopeless ejaculations of the searchers was received with ill-concealed shrieks of amusement by the hiders. At last they are discovered, and the curtain falls on the most glorious hour in the whole week. For just as men and women love the old plays and the old ideas of drama, so children will have the same game of hide-and-seek or what not, and play it in the same way with the same absurd ritual religiously carried out, and he alone is worthy of fatherhood who can take an honourable part in such affairs with real solemnity and enthusiasm.

But these baby days departed, and the Sunday mornings had to be passed in Christ Church, Marylebone, surely the most unsociable church I have ever entered. I used to shudder for fear that after all heaven might turn out to be something like Christ Church, Marylebone. It still haunts me in dyspeptic dreams. It was a huge classical building, as cheerful as a family vault, with one painting over the altar—​how many hours have I spent gazing at it—​and no other memorable decoration. The congregation were penned apart in high boxes. Our box had tall red hassocks. I used to be allowed to stand on one of these, until I fell off it into the bottom of the pen audibly and demonstratively. After that I was consigned to the floor, from which you could not see even bonnets, and from this limbo I only emerged by gradual growth. The preacher wore a black gown. My earliest meeting with him must, I think, have been at the font. I remember his grave tones, clear voice and dignified presence. I know now he must have preached excellent sermons, for he was the Rev. Llewelyn Davies. But in those days my brother and I fully believed he was the anonymous “righteous man” in the Psalms whose doings and sayings are so carefully chronicled.

From Regent’s Park we moved away to Kensington, and thence to Holland Park. Here it was that in the seventies, during the last few years of my father’s life, I heard in snatches from himself and his older friends something of the story of his career. I was then at King’s College School, which at that time was situated below Somerset House, and as I travelled up and down in the Underground—​often with my father—​and did my home-lessons in his library and dined with him nearly every night, and often went to the play with him of an evening, I had the good fortune to see more of him than I should have done had I been away at school.

He must have had a keen struggle in his early days to reach the position he did at the Bar. Born in London in 1816, he was only sixteen years old when the sudden death of his father made it necessary for him to earn his own living. He was then being educated at the Philological School, an old foundation in Marylebone, but he left school at once and went into a merchant’s office. Edwin Abbott, the head-master of the Philological School, continued his firm friend, and years afterwards his daughter Elizabeth married my father, who was then a Serjeant. But I do not propose to write of my mother in these pages, since I could not do justice to the grace of her memory, and the dim vision of it is my own affair.

The Abbotts were, as I understand, an old family of yeomen and farmers in Dorsetshire. I have seen a pamphlet concerning the great George Abbott, Archbishop of Canterbury, who bravely withstood James I. in the matter of the Essex divorce, showing that he was of the same family. I hope it may be so. My father used to laugh at genealogy, but for my part I rather like to speculate on pedigrees and family history. It is pleasant to trace one’s line back to tanners and farmers and attorneys, even with a dash of the Church thrown in. The ancestry of the horse and the greyhound is a study for every gambler on the course, and why should not a student of eugenics be interested in the evolution of the entries for the human race?

Whilst he was in a merchant’s office my father attended classes at the Aldersgate Institution, a valuable educational society promoted by Lord Brougham, and he became a constant attendant at a debating club held there. He was a great believer in orderly debate as a method of education, and was always ready to discuss with me the subject of debate in my School Society. The art of speaking he thought should be equally a part of elementary education with reading and writing, and his view was that if such were the case the charlatan and the windbag would have less chance of capturing the ear of the public.

From the merchant’s stool he found his way to the British Museum, where he was an assistant for some years, and formed a lasting friendship with Anthony Panizzi, who was then keeper of the printed books. I remember Richard Garnett showing me one of the slips in the catalogue in my father’s handwriting in the days before that great work was printed. All this time he was reading for the Bar and taking an active interest in the political movements of the day. George Jacob Holyoake remembers him as a young law-student at No. 5, Gray’s Inn Road. He describes him as a stalwart, energetic platform speaker, and notes that he ultimately acquired two styles like O’Connell, the more gaseous of which he retained solely to illuminate electors.

In 1842, the year before he was called, he was one of the most active members of the Moral Force Chartists. Hanging on my walls in a dark, old-fashioned veneered frame is a large print in many colours of the famous Charter—​a harmless exploded torpedo nowadays no doubt—​but in 1842 the symbol of a grave reality. For Chartism, as Carlyle pointed out, was “the bitter discontent grown fierce and mad, the wrong condition therefore, or the wrong disposition of the Working Classes of England.” With the ring of the true prophet in his words he foresaw in 1842 that Chartism “did not begin yesterday; will by no means end this day or to-morrow … new and ever new embodiments, chimeras madder or less mad have to continue.”

My father’s part at this time was the editing of a magazine called the National Associations Gazette. The problem it set itself out to deal with was why when all kinds of property were recognised and protected the property which a man has in his labour was to be unsupported and unrepresented. The political programme, in the “order of going in,” so to speak, was (1) the Charter; (2) Universal Suffrage of men and women; and (3) National Education. I have often heard my father in argument with other reformers laying down—​too dogmatically as I thought—​that National Education before Suffrage was the cart before the horse. If you educate masses to think and deny them the power of practically endeavouring to translate their thought into national action it is bound to break out into anti-national actions. Who shall say in regard to recent events in England and India that there was not much good sense in his reasoning.

From my very earliest childhood I seem to have heard of Chartists and Chartism and the “Condition of England,” question which, after all, remains with us to-day turbulently unanswered. Very often of a Sunday afternoon we would drive over to some obscure lodgings in Paddington to see Mr. William Lovett. I remember him as a mild, amiable, white-haired old gentleman who had a wonderful facility for making models, and whilst he and my father talked of the old days of the National Complete Suffrage Union and Birmingham meetings, I used to inspect with ardent curiosity some ingenious model of Windsor Castle upon which Mr. Lovett was at work. I think my father and some others assisted Mr. Lovett, and I know that he had a great admiration and affection for him, which continued until his death in 1877. I stood in great awe of Mr. Lovett, for I knew that he had been heavily fined for refusing to serve in the Militia in days long ago, and had suffered imprisonment in Warwick gaol for his protest against the unconstitutional employment of the Metropolitan police in Birmingham. This frail, delicate old man, with the cunning fingers building quaint models in a back parlour in Paddington, the sweetest and friendliest of human beings, had been, in the eyes of the government, a revolutionist. I was always ready to go with my father to see him. I liked the mystery of him.

The energy my father displayed in his early years at the Bar must have been considerable. He was much in demand as a lecturer, and as he told me, for a year or two his main source of income was the delivery throughout England of his lectures on the Oratory of the Bar, the Pulpit and the Stage, and another interesting series on the French Revolution, a subject in which he was deeply read.

I came across a gentleman in Manchester who well remembered his lecturing at the Athenæum in 1844, and gave him great praise for his dramatic recitals on the Oratory of the Stage. But his practice at the Bar must soon have made lecturing tours unnecessary and impossible. When he was called he said in fun to some friends he was entertaining, that as soon as he was earning a thousand a year he would give them all a far better feast. The banquet took place within four years of the invitation.

His interest in politics never diminished. But when he had made his great name as an advocate, all invitations to contest a seat in Parliament were refused. In 1847 he contested Norwich unsuccessfully against Lord Douro and Sir Samuel Peto, and in 1857 stood for Finsbury against Thomas Slingsby Duncombe, who was returned by a large majority. In this election he used to say his chances were seriously interfered with by a charge—​not true, in fact—​that he had signed a petition to open the Crystal Palace and British Museum on Sunday. As he explained, the only reason he had not signed such a petition was that he had never been asked.

I have often heard my father speaking in Court, but it was at a time when I could understand very little of the merits of the dispute or the quality of the advocacy. He was one of the leaders of the Home Circuit, a veritable nest of giants, with Bovill, Ballantine, Hawkins, Lush and Shee. In those days the Home Circuit was a reality. It was before the abolition of local venue, and every case had to be set down in the assize town of the county in which it arose. Thus at Guildford, Kingston or Croydon, all Surrey cases had to be tried, and the lists took a fortnight or more to finish. My father sometimes took a furnished house at Guildford in the summer, and we all moved down there, and on occasion I was taken into Court to hear him speak. In later years I heard him in several cases, but in no speech of first-rate importance, and I never heard him defend a prisoner, at which, I have been told by good judges, he had few equals. I should say his great asset as an advocate was his honesty and openness. There is no such thing as first-rate advocacy without a large measure of frankness. He was very smooth and good-natured in cross-examination, recognising that to make your way through the defences of the enemy requires, if the enemy is alert, more strategy than force. He never indulged in those snappy interjections and quarrelsome interferences which are but too common, and which, to my mind, are the very badge and stamp of incompetent advocacy. I fancy to-day his speeches to the jury would be too ornate, too eloquent and too full of oratory, but in his own day, and among the juries he had to address, it was more true of him than of any other that “persuasion hung upon his lips.” Nor can I be very clear that his style was really too flamboyant, for I was brought up myself in the school of Russell and Holker on the Northern Circuit, where there was a passion for business methods, and curt address and the use of the bludgeon, rather than the rapier, in cross-examination, which has not even to this day penetrated to the more leisurely south. For I find that even in southern county courts advocates are known not only to demand the presence of juries, but to address them with great complacency on any subject at any distance from that subject. County court juries are nearly unknown in the North, where a trial is regarded more as a matter of business than an affair of display.

When my late brother Judge Willis, K.C., was a junior he was a constant visitor at my father’s house at Holland Park, and I well remember him telling a capital story of Holker’s wit as an advocate. Holker was cross-examining a big, vulgar Jew jeweller in a money-lending case, and began by looking him up and down in a sleepy, dismal way, and drawled out, “Well, Mr. Moselwein, and what are you?”

“A genschelman,” replied the jeweller with emphasis.

“Just so, just so,” ejaculated Holker with a dreary yawn, “but what were you, Mr. Moselwein, before you were a gentleman?”

The answer was drowned in a roar of laughter.

“Capital story, Willis, and very clever,” said my father as he finished laughing, “always supposing Holker didn’t want to get any admissions out of the fellow afterwards.”

It is a pleasant and fairly easy thing for an advocate to score off a witness, but it does not always mean business, and nothing is nearer to the gospel of the matter than this, that every unnecessary question in cross-examination is a blunder and every question the answer to which you have not foreseen is unnecessary.

Affairs of conscience at the Bar and the duty of the advocate were often discussed between my father and his legal friends, and in the late seventies, when I was at King’s College School, I heard many interesting conversations on these themes.

As an illustration of his argument someone told a story of an old special pleader whose name I forget. Special pleaders, I may remind the reader, did not address the Court, but drafted the “pleadings,” as they are called—​that is to say, the documents in which the parties state their respective cases and endeavour to settle the issue. In the old days these pleas were very technical, and special pleaders who signed and settled the claim, defence, rejoinder, sur-rejoinder, rebutter and sur-rebutter made good incomes out of constant but small fees.

The Pleader was in his chambers in King’s Bench Walk, when late one night a young Hebrew clerk of a firm of City solicitors rushed in, and throwing down half a guinea and some papers said, “I vant a plea.”

“But what sort of a plea—​what is the defence?” asked the Pleader.

“There is no defence,” said the candid clerk, “but the governor says he vould like a set-off. He vants to gain time.”

“Hm!” said the Pleader, “a merely dilatory plea to gain time. I don’t approve of such a thing; but still----”

He drew out his “Bullen and Leake” and copied out the first plea he came to, which was to the effect that by agreement made by and between the plaintiff and defendant, the defendant bargained and sold to the plaintiff certain Russian hemp, to arrive by and be delivered by the ship Sarcophagus, at the price of £15 per ton, and after further formalities the defendant sought to set-off the price of this Russian hemp against the plaintiff’s claim. This he handed to the boy, who took it away.

A year afterwards the same lad returned with another set of defenceless papers and another half-guinea, and asked for a similar plea to be drawn. The Pleader looked at him doubtfully.

“What became of that last case?” he asked.

“Ve proved your plea! Ve proved it!” cried the young clerk in triumph. “It vos magnificent! Ve vant another. Ve cannot prove the same plea twice.”

The moral verdict seemed to go against the special pleader, who had not, it appeared, been properly instructed in the Russian hemp affair, and it led my father to a curious story of a case in which he had recently appeared in an inquiry de lunatico. I had driven down with him one Saturday some time before to Dr. Tuke’s private asylum, where he went to interview his client. The gentleman had great wealth and was very eccentric, and had recently announced in public that he was our Saviour. He was certified as a lunatic and had demanded an inquiry. When we arrived at the house he was playing a game of billiards with his coat off, but he shook hands very amicably with my father and put his coat on, and he and the solicitor went along for a conference whilst I had a hundred up with a young doctor. I had never seen anyone who was supposed to be insane before and could not understand, how such a thing could possibly be suggested of the gentleman I had just met. My father told me on our way home that he had asked him all manner of questions, which he answered in the most businesslike manner, and then he said, “I found I must ask him a question, about his mania. ‘Have you or have you not,’ I asked, ‘maintained that you are our Saviour?’”

“I have,” he said, “and I can give you proofs,” and he proceeded to ramble incoherently and foolishly. “When he had finished,” continued my father, “all I said was ‘Well, Mr. X., no doubt you believe in it, and if you are asked about it you must speak the truth, but in my humble opinion it is not a strong point in our case.’

“‘You think not?’ asked Mr. X. eagerly.

“‘I am sure of it,’ said my father. ‘Absolutely convinced of it.’ Mr. X. nodded his head thoughtfully, and so the conference ended.”

When the case came on, Ballantine for the relatives cross-examined Mr. X., who gave him very admirable, straightforward answers, until the jury shifted about uneasily and wondered why the man’s liberty had been interfered with. At last Ballantine came to the conclusion he must get to grips with him, and suddenly asked him very sternly: “I put it to you, that on several occasions you have proclaimed yourself to be our Saviour? Is that so? Yes or no.”

Mr. X. smiled.

“I have consulted my legal advisers on that point,” he replied in a firm, quiet voice, “and they are all clearly of opinion that it is not a strong point in my case, and under those circumstances I must decline to answer any questions about the matter.”

Ballantine could not get him to move from his resolution, and he was restored to his liberty and his estates.

My father and Ballantine were great rivals at Westminster and on Circuit, and I remember my father coming home with a capital story against himself which he used to tell with much glee. He and Ballantine were engaged in a case before Baron Martin, and he heard a Scots clerk in whispered tones pointing out to a friend from beyond Tweed the various celebrities.

“Who is yon?” whispered the visitor, pointing to the judge.

“Martin! Baron Martin,” replied the cicerone. “He’s a grand mon, a great mon!”

“And the mon that’s speakin’ the noo!”

“That’s Ballantine. He’s a great advocate. He’s a grand mon!”

“And the big mon sitting next him?”

My father pricked up his ears intently. The guide’s voice fell a semitone to a minor key. “That! Oh, that’s Porry! Serjeant Porry. He’s a highly over-r-rated mon.”

I wish my father could have lived long enough for me to have heard him at his best at one of those Garrick dinners, where he loved to get two or three gathered together in the right place and enjoy pleasant discourse over the walnuts and wine. Good port and good stories were his hobbies. There may be better ones, but I doubt it. And anyhow “so long as a man rides his hobby-horse peacefully and quietly along the King’s highway, and neither compels you nor me to get up behind him—​pray, sir, what have either you or I to do with it?” But if I had had the sense or foresight to play the Boswell, what a collection of good stories even I might have chronicled. Years after he was gone I was brought up to a London county court to fight an employers’ liability case, and the counsel against me was Mr. Wildy Wright. Good-natured, obtrusive and antique were his methods of advocacy, but I was glad to have met him in the flesh, for he recalled to my mind my father returning from Croydon Assizes bubbling over with delight about a story of a “certain judge” recently appointed and Mr. Wildy Wright.

The judge had been puzzled by a fierce objection to evidence made by Mr. Wildy Wright, and reserved his ruling on this point until he had consulted his brother judge at the adjournment.

During the luncheon interval he put the point to his brother, who was deeply puzzled.

“And who raised the point?” he asked after a few moments of complicated thought.

“Wildy Wright.”

“Oh!” replied his brother with a sigh of relief, “Wildy Wright! Overrule it. And if he makes any other objections, overrule them too.”

The learned judge, much relieved, went back to Court, and in courteous, silvern tones said, “Mr. Wright, I have carefully considered the objection you raised before the adjournment and consulted my learned brother, and we are both agreed that I ought to overrule it. And I may say for your assistance that if in the course of the case you make any other objections, I shall feel it my duty to overrule those also.”

Now I begin to remember those old days and that very happy home, I feel I should like to try and paint many pictures of its happiness, but it would be far from my purpose. All I wish to set down is that from the very first, like Mr. Vincent Crummles’s pony, who, you will remember, went on circuit all his life, I was brought up among briefs and the talk of law shop and the traditions of the profession. It was always one of my ambitions to go to the Bar, but I had very little hope then that it would be realised. My elder brother, John Humffreys Parry, who chose afterwards to go on the stage and, after playing in America with Richard Mansfield, died at the beginning of a brilliant career, was far better equipped than I was to wear my father’s robes when he should lay them down. Moreover, in early life, to use a north-country phrase, I “enjoyed” bad health. I had nearly every fever known to physicians and fell into the surgeon’s hands twice, breaking a collar-bone and nearly losing my left hand with an accident arising out of and in the course of my employment by running a chisel through it whilst building a toy theatre. In these and other ways my school-days were often interfered with, and I have been “backward” as the phrase is ever since.

And how things might have shaped themselves had my father lived, I cannot say. But that was not to be. For in January, 1880, with little warning, a tragedy swept away the home that in my young seeming was the one beautifully permanent, solid fact in the whole world. My father and mother died within a day of one another and were buried on the same morning. And there was no home, only a memory.