59 CHAPTER III. "By thy glad youth and tranquil prime For thou art doom'd in age to know The glory of a life well spent. WILSON. HAMPTON LODGE was situate about half a mile from the village of Little Hampton, not very far, if I remember rightly, from an old church, among the trees; but it is long since I was there, and the Downs, they tell me, have been so over-built, that I should have great difficulty in recognizing the various walks which, during a period of great mental anxiety, afforded me much and frequent delight. Time has galloped through the last fifty years at an amazing rate; and it has been no easy matter to keep pace with him. I sometimes feel, when I look back at the events of this present miraculous age, as if I had lived almost as long as the Wandering Jew, such wonderful changes have taken place around me. I do not speak of the wars and revolutions that shook earth to its very centre, but the still more extraordinary revolutions in things and people-the sweeping away of much that impeded the range of thought and the spread of information—and at the same time, the danger that those swelling floods might overthrow what they could not restore; it certainly is very, very wonderful to look back even for a little time; and all that I, an old woman, can do, is to pray that, whatever we let go, we may hold fast that which is right. Hampton Lodge was very retired in its situation, and Little Hampton a charming, quiet country village; its proximity to the sea imparting a deeper interest to its inhabitants than inland villages possess-at least, for me. In addition to the usual dwellers in an out-of-the-way hamlet, there were one or two boat-builders, and some comfortable wellto-do householders, who were more than suspected of being given to smuggling. You frequently met careless, off-hand-looking fisher lads on the beach, singing snatches of Dibdin's songs, and throwing stones at the seagulls, that seemed hardly to avoid them; and a rudely constructed pier very near the mouth of the river, where it rushed into the sea, was the tryst of many of the village girls with their sailor-lovers. Where the most convenient bathing machines have long congregated, there then stood a blackened-looking hut, that seemed to have been built of drift wood; its door was secured by a huge hasp and pad-lock; this building contained a coffin-like tub, in which, by giving notice on a previous night to a weird sort of woman who lived in a fisherman's house close to the rockless beach, yon could, on the following morning, enjoy the luxury of a warm salt-water bath; and if you did not like to make your toilet on the strand, you might be able to secure the shelter of the 'bathing house,' by application to the same woman and the payment of sixpence, that is supposing she was in good humour and at home, two circumstances not to be always reckoned on. It certainly was a primitive place in those days; the inhabitants of the village were quite natural and unsophisticated-disposed to treat visitors at the lodge with great respect, for they saw few strangers-and the curate's wife was likely to borrow your spencer, or request to see how your bonnet was trimmed, coming so lately from London; while inquiries as to how you bore the fatigue were as numerous as the families who visited the Middletons. There were old ladies, who shook their heads and gravely hinted at the wickedness of a town life-and young ones, who thought with the thoughtless bravery of youth, what signified the wickedness to them! if they could only get to 'town,' they would not care for its wickedness-they would have nothing to do with that. There was a half mad woman who wrote rhyme and called it poetry; and a sentimental young man who commenced his conversations by the inquiry, "By the bye, do you admire Shakespere?" or, "Don't you think Milton is ray-ther heavy ?" There was a bluff fox-hunting squire, all noise and 'bluster,' who tally-ho'd his daughters into dinner, and instilled early into his sons a hatred of French wines and an affection for strong drinks; who associated the idea of a university education with beer-drinking, rowing, and mad pranks on the provost-who cracked jokes upon the parson, which the parson, I am sorry to say, was not either slow or delicate in returning; and yet he spared the curate, and would send him a hare and a brace of birds frequently, simply because the curate's earnestness and piety commanded his respect. There were children-that a childless prince would have coveted to call his own-wandering from their cottage-doors into the sheltered meadows or breezy uplands-there were dames in linen caps, pinned beneath their chins, 'neatly put on,' who had never been so far from home as Arundel, and did not know that England was an island, though they heard she 'ruled the waves-there was a schoolmaster, plump and brisk, who rattled his cane as if it had |