[5] An Indian one, patiently investigated for me by Mr. Burgess, was fastened with glue which entirely defied cold water, and yielded only to the kettle. [↑]
[6] She bites them round the edge roughly enough; but pushes them down with a tucked-up rim, quite tight, like the first covering of a pot of preserve. [↑]
[8] He does not give the date. [↑]
FORS CLAVIGERA.
LETTER LIII.
Brantwood, Good Friday, 1875.
I am ashamed to go on with my own history to-day; for though, as already seen, I was not wholly unacquainted with the practice of fasting, at times of the year when it was not customary with Papists, our Lent became to us a kind of moonlight Christmas, and season of reflected and soft festivity. For our strictly Protestant habits of mind rendering us independent of absolution, on Shrove Tuesday we were chiefly occupied in the preparation of pancakes,—my nurse being dominant on that day over the cook in all things, her especially nutritive art of browning, and fine legerdemain in turning, pancakes, being recognised as inimitable. The interest of Ash-Wednesday was mainly—whether the bits of egg should be large or small in the egg-sauce;—nor do I recollect having any ideas connected with the day’s name, until I was puzzled by the French of it when I fell in love with a Roman Catholic French girl, as hereafter to be related:—only, by the way, let me note, as I chance now to remember, two others of my [[118]]main occupations of an exciting character in Hunter Street: watching, namely, the dustmen clear out the ash-hole, and the coalmen fill the coal-cellar through the hole in the pavement, which soon became to me, when surrounded by its cone of débris, a sublime representation of the crater of a volcanic mountain. Of these imaginative delights I have no room to speak in this Fors; nor of the debates which used to be held for the two or three days preceding Good Friday, whether the hot-cross-buns should be plain, or have carraway seeds in them. For, my nurse not being here to provide any such dainties for me, and the black-plague wind which has now darkened the spring for five years,[1] veiling all the hills with sullen cloud, I am neither in a cheerful nor a religious state of mind; and am too much in the temper of the disciples who forsook Him, and fled, to be able to do justice to the childish innocence of belief, which, in my mother, was too constant to need resuscitation, or take new colour, from fast or festival.
Yet it is only by her help, to-day, that I am able to do a piece of work required of me by the letter printed in the second article of this month’s correspondence. It is from a man of great worth, conscientiousness, and kindliness; but is yet so perfectly expressive of the irreverence, and incapacity of admiration, which [[119]]maintain and, in great part, constitute, the modern liberal temper, that it makes me feel, more than anything I ever yet met with in human words, how much I owe to my mother for having so exercised me in the Scriptures as to make me grasp them in what my correspondent would call their ‘concrete whole’; and above all, taught me to reverence them, as transcending all thought, and ordaining all conduct.