At times he looked as though he were a little weary of it all; and in a book of his I found this note:—“16 April 1869. My birthday—now 80 years old—and have no wish to see another. My good wishes to all behind.” In the following March he would persist in sitting out upon the seat behind the sun-dial, to listen to the black-birds and the thrushes, although the winds were bleak and cold; and there he caught the chill of which he died. He did not see another birthday.
In his last illness he was nursed by Mrs *****; and thirty years and more afterwards she was very fond of discussing with me what had happened to him—whether he had gone to Heaven or elsewhere. She would weigh the two sides of the question very carefully, and finish up with “Well, I hope he be in Heaven.”
She had no doubts about her own destination, and very often told me that she needed no parsons to hoist her into Heaven. But she was not in any hurry to get there. Looking out across her garden on a gorgeous summer afternoon, she turned to me, and said, “I were just a-wonderin’ if Heaven be so very much better ’an this: ’cause, aless it were, I don’t know as I’d care for the change.”
One thing, however, troubled her—the old belief that people who die before the prime of life, remain for all eternity at the age at which they die, whereas people who die in later years, go back to their prime. And she told me of the difficulties that she foresaw:—“If I went back to what I were like some forty year agone, how could they as only knowed me afterward come forth and say ‘Why, here be Mrs *****’, when I came steppin’ up?”
As for my grandfather, his Works were undeniable; but she had her doubts about his Faith. He was interested and amused by the controversies that raged around religion, and thought the kettle might be better than the pot, yet had no wish for being boiled in either. I doubt if he had any beliefs beyond a shadowy sort of Theism that was not far removed from Pantheism. And that made him a very kindly personage, doing all manner of good.
He writes to my father, 16 September 1861:—“I have attended the sick rooms of the poor in this neighbourhood on all occasions, typhus or anything else, and I often say the alwise Governor of the Universe has protected me, and allowed me to arrive at the age allotted for man; and I find generally speaking, when people attend the sick from pure philanthropic motives, they are preserved from infection.” But he did not concur in similar reasoning by the Rector’s wife. He writes, 30 December 1860:—“Mrs ***** says Never anyone yet took cold in a church, and I cannot agree with her, for I believe many more colds are taken at church than elsewhere.”
My grandfather often enjoins my father not to let his letters be seen, as he writes offhand without consideration. And this is very evident in many of them. He will begin with some assertion, then qualify it with ‘not but what’ etc., ‘though no doubt’ etc., and so on, till at last he talks himself quite round, and ends by saying just the opposite of what he said at first. His sister-in-law, my great-aunt Anne Smale, had her last illness here; and he writes to my father, 8 January 1865:—“It has been a dreary week having a corpse in the house. It is seventy years ago that my grandmother died [really sixty-six years] and there has not been a death in the house since. Well, she was buried in a vault in the chancel of Manaton church.” And this leads him on to speak of other members of the family lying in that vault, and thus to reminiscences of some of them, ending quite jocosely.
He used to keep a record of the weather here; and in this he sometimes noted things quite unconnected with the weather, such as, “Mr ***** called: had no wish to see him.” But generally there was some connexion. Thus, on 25 January 1847, he notes “St Paul’s day, sun shining, and according to prediction we shall have a plentiful year: may God grant it.” On 1 September 1847, “Woodpecker called aloud for wet: wish he may be true, the turnips want it.” On 12 May 1857, “Soft mild rain: what the old people call butter-and-barley weather.” On St Swithin’s day, 15 July 1867, “Heavy rain: so 40 days of it.”
There are also many notes about the singing of the birds—26 January 1847, “the home-screech singing merrily this morning”—1 May 1850, “the nut-hatch a cheerful singer”—22 April 1864, “how delightful and cheering is that old grey-bird”—and so on. I may note that the home-screech is the mistle-thrush, and the grey-bird is the song-thrush, sometimes known here as the grey thrush, just as the black-bird is known as the black thrush. In these parts the field-fare is the blue-bird.
Their singing was always a pleasure to him; and he writes to my sister, 10 March 1852:—“I have often fancied that the thrushes know that I am pleased, when I am listening to them, from the cast of their little sharp eye down on me.” But he liked birds better in the spring, when they were singing, than in the autumn, when they were eating up his fruit. Even in the spring he writes to my father, 29 April 1849:—“I certainly do like to hear them sing, but it is vexing to lose all the fruit.... I loaded my gun; but, when I came out, one of them struck up such a merry note that I could not do it—so I suppose the fruit must be sacrificed to my cowardice, humanity, or what you may call it.” The crops were sacrificed as well. He writes, 21 June 1846:—“There are two nests of wood-pigeons here, and they daily visit me. I have taken the gun twice to shoot them, but my heart failed me.”