were, but a moment ago had come across his path.
And then the forgetting of a word or a name. “Now into what pigeon-hole of my brain did that go, and why do I suddenly remember it now?” And as these thoughts passed through his mind and were spoken dreamily, so they also appeared in his face. Another instant, perhaps, and his eyes would be full of fun and laughter.
At the beginning of his literary career he suffered a great sorrow in the death—a very sudden death—of my mother’s sister, Mary Hogarth. She was of a most charming and lovable disposition, as well as being personally very beautiful. Soon after my parents married, Aunt Mary was constantly with them. As her nature developed she became my father’s ideal of what a young girl should be. And his own words show how this great affection and the influence of the girl’s loved memory were with him to the end of his life. The
shock of her sudden death so affected and prostrated him that the publication of “Pickwick” was interrupted for two months.
“I look back,” he wrote, “and with unmingled pleasure, to every link which each ensuing week has added to the chain of our attachment. It shall go hard I hope ere anything but death impairs the toughness of a bond now so firmly riveted. That beautiful passage you were so kind and considerate as to send to me has given me the only feeling akin to pleasure, sorrowful pleasure it is, that I have yet had connected with the loss of my dear young friend and companion, for whom my love and attachment will never diminish, and by whose side, if it please God to leave me in possession of sense to signify my wishes, my bones whenever or wherever I die, will one day be laid.”
She was buried in Kensal Green Cemetery,
and her grave bears the following inscription, written by my father:
“Young, beautiful, and good, God in His mercy numbered her among His angels at the early age of seventeen.”
A year after her death, in writing to my mother from Yorkshire, he says: “Is it not extraordinary that the same dreams which have constantly visited me since poor Mary died follow me everywhere? After all the change of scene and fatigue I have dreamt of her ever since I left home, and no doubt shall until I return. I would fain believe, sometimes, that her spirit may have some influence over them, but their perpetual repetition is extraordinary.”
In the course of years there came changes in our home, inevitable changes. But no changes could ever alter my father’s home-loving nature. As he wrote to Mr. Forster, as a young man, so it was with him to the time of his death: “We