"Southgate, Sept. 4.—As the dreary hours at Braine le Comte waned, two English families arrived from Namur, and with two ladies, 'Alice and Sybil,' and the boys of Sybil, I sallied out to see Braine le Comte, and then into the forest to pick bilberries for the luncheon which I had no money to buy. Then I arrived in the night at Lille, and being unable to find a hotel in the dark, and indeed having no money to pay for going to one, wandered about till at length I collapsed altogether on the doorstep of one of the houses. Here I was found by some of the old market-women when they arrived for the opening of the market at dawn, and they took me into the halles, and made me share their early breakfast. This was a kind of black broth in a huge wooden bowl, into which we all dipped a great spoon in turns, but it was most welcome, and the old women were very kind to me."
It was a great pleasure this autumn to pay a little visit to my mother's old friend Miss Clinton, whose frequent visits to Lime had counted as some of the happiest days of my childhood. She was essentially what the French call "bonne à vivre," so good-humoured and cheerful, and so indulgent to the faults of others. The crystal stream of her common-sense had always seemed to stir up the stagnant quagmire of religious inanities which the Maurice sisters had surrounded us with at Hurstmonceaux.
"Cokenach, Oct. 3.—I was so glad to come here for two days. The dear old Stoke carriage with Lou Clinton[78] in it met me at Royston. She took me first to see the antiquities—Lady Rohesia's chapel and Roysie's Cave, which gave the place its name, and a house where James I. stayed when he came hunting, in which his bedroom is preserved with its old furniture: in the garden is the first mulberry-tree planted in England. We reached Cokenach by the field roads.
"I was taken up at once to Lady Louisa,[79] who sate, as years ago, in her large chair by the blazing firelogs, with all her baskets of papers round her, and her table covered with things."
As it was considered a settled point that I was to take Orders when I was grown up (a point on which no single member of the family allowed any discussion or difference of opinion), and that I was then to have the rich family living of Hurstmonceaux, in the gift of my brother Francis, my whole education up to this time had been with that intention. My mother, therefore, was quite enchanted when my admiration of the Béguinages which I had seen in Belgium led me, in the autumn of 1852, to devote every spare moment to a sort of missionary work in the low wretched districts of Southgate. I had read in St. Vincent de Paul: "L'action bonne et parfaite est le véritable caractère de l'amour de Dieu ... c'est l'amour effectif qu'il faut à Dieu," and I determined to try to act upon it.
To MY MOTHER.
"Sept. 29, 1852.—I have now regularly entered on my parochial duties. There is a long strip of cottages in the village, yet out of Southgate parish, and which the clergyman of their own parish will have nothing to do with, as those of the inhabitants who go to church go to Southgate, so that he gets no marriage fees. The people would have been dreadfully neglected if Mrs. Bradley had not taken care of them, and as it is, they are in a very bad state, most of the men drunkards, and their wives and children starving. As the houses look out upon an open drain, they teem with illness for which there is no remedy. The children spend their days in making mud-pies upon the road.... I have now got all these cottages as my peculiar province.
"Most of the people cannot, or fancy they cannot, go to church, so I offered to have a sort of 'cottage reading' every Tuesday in the house of one of the better people—a Mrs. Perry. I was rather alarmed, though glad, to see how many came.... I tried to make the reading as interesting and easy as I could, and afterwards ventured upon a little 'discourse.'
"It was strange to find this really heathen colony—for they know nothing—close by, and I am glad to have a foretaste of what my life's work will be like."
"Southgate, October 12.—Mr. Bradley is in nothing so extraordinary as in the education of his children. All the moral lessons to his little daughter Jesse are taken from reminiscences of his 'poor dear first wife,' who never existed. I am used to it now, but was amazed when I first heard little Jesse ask something about 'your poor dear first wife, papa,' and he took out a handkerchief and covered over both their heads that no one might see them cry, which the little girl did abundantly over the touching story told her. Little Charlie's education was carried on in a similar way, only the model held up to him was a son of Mrs. Bradley's by an imaginary first husband, who 'died and is buried in Oxfordshire.' Little Moses's mamma, 'Mrs. Jochebed Amram,' is also held up as an effective example of Christian piety and patience, but Moses himself never touches their feelings at all. I must send you one of the allegories which I have heard Bradley tell his children; it is such a characteristic specimen:—