“What for?” she continued.
“Because it is about ghosts, Ann, and such stories as you often tell me. Put it up or Father will be cross with me.”
“Well, Amelia,” she said in a kind of dreamy way, “your father ought to know, but he isn’t a bit well lately, so I won’t bother him at this time.”
Then I promised to tell her the stories, and added, “They are all true, Ann, for John Wesley wrote them.”
“True!” she ejaculated. “Well, well, I am astonished at Mr. Huddleston’s putting anything John Wesley wrote out of the way. I am that.” About A.D. 1890 I asked a learned doctor connected with the Methodist Book Concern, if they had a copy of it, and he answered very sharply, “I never heard of the book.” Yet I know it existed in my childhood, and that during my seventh and eighth years, I read it frequently.
The first year of my life in Penrith went happily onward in the regularity of its duties and pleasures. At home I remember but few changes. Soon after the Queen’s coronation, I had another brother, who was called William Henry, and when he was about two months old, my father went to Manchester, and brought back with him the greatest of household comforts of that day—a dozen boxes of Congreve or Lucifer matches. Only those who have stood shivering over the old tinder box on a bitter winter night, trying to get a spark while the baby screamed in the darkness, can form any estimate of the pleasure which these few boxes of matches made in our house. My father took us all into a dark room, and then permitted each person to strike a light. Laughter and exclamations of wonder and pleasure greeted every fresh match as it burst into instantaneous flame, even Ann was enthusiastic. “This time,” she admitted, “Mr. Huddleston has brought home something sensible and good for everybody”—a covert slur upon Father’s gifts, which usually took the form of books, or a bit of spar for the parlor chimney piece, or perhaps a likeness of Mr. Wordsworth, or a view of Derwentwater. We had both 38 read and heard wonderful things of these matches for nearly three years, but the first put upon the market were intended only for the rich; for they were in more or less costly caskets, the cheapest of which was sold for a guinea. In a short time a phial full of matches were sold for five shillings, and when my father bought our first “light boxes” they were a shilling each. Then came the practical chemist and the factory system, and the penny box of matches was in every home. Yet I have no doubt that in many a home in England the empty five shilling box is affectionately preserved; for during their vogue, they were sensible and highly prized wedding gifts, among a large class of respectable people of limited means.
At the beginning of my second school year, I was promoted to a copy book. I could write pretty well with wad, and did not very often spoil a goose quill. That first copy book! Never shall I forget it. Its cover was canary color, and on the front was a picture of a negro. He was loaded with chains and hoeing cotton, while a white man stood over him using an impossible whip, and there were four lines by Cowper underneath the two figures:
“I would not have a slave to till my ground,
To carry me, to fan me while I sleep,
And tremble when I wake, for all the wealth