The old vicarage at Stratton is now pulled down: it stood at the east end of the chancel, and the garden has been thrown into the burial-ground.
At Stratton he got one night into the stable of the surgeon, hogged the mane, and painted the coat of his horse like a zebra with white and black oil paint. Then he sent a message to the doctor, as if from a great house at a distance, requiring his immediate attendance. The doctor was obliged to saddle and gallop off the horse in the condition in which he found it, thinking that there was not time for him to stay till the coat was cleaned of paint.
His pranks at Plymouth led at last to his grandfather refusing to have him any longer in his house.
Robert held in aversion the good pious ladies, who swarmed round the doctor. It was the time of sedan-chairs; and trains of old spinsters and dowagers were wont to fill the street in their boxes between bearers, on the occasion of missionary teas, Dorcas meetings, and private expositions of the Word. Robert used to open the house door, and make a sign to the bearers to stop. A row of a dozen or more sedans were thus arrested in the street. Then the boy would go to each sedan in order, open the window, and, thrusting his head in, kiss the fair but venerable occupant, and then start back in mock dismay, exclaiming: “A thousand pardons! I thought you were my mother. I am sorry. How could I have made such a mistake, you are so much older?”
Sometimes, with the gravest face, he would tell the bearers that the lady was to be conveyed to the Dockyard, or the Arsenal, or to the Hoe; and she would find herself deposited among anchors and ropes, or cannon-balls, or on the windy height overlooking the bay, instead of at the doctor’s door.
Two old ladies, spinster sisters, Robert believed were setting their caps at the doctor, then a widower. He took an inveterate dislike to them, and their insinuating, oily manner with his grandfather; and he worried them out of Plymouth.
He did it thus. One day he called on a certain leading physician in Plymouth, and told him that Miss Hephzibah Jenkins had slipped on a piece of orange peel, broken her leg, and needed his instant attention. He arrived out of breath with running, very red; and, it being known that the Misses Jenkins were intimate friends of Dr. Hawker, the physician went off at once to the lady, with splints and bandages.
Next day another medical man was sent to see Miss Sidonia Jenkins. Every day a fresh surgeon or physician arrived to bind up legs and arms and heads, or revive the ladies from extreme prostration, pleurisy, inflammation of the lungs, heart-complaint, etc., till every medical man in Plymouth, Stonehouse and Devonport had been to the house of the spinsters. When these were exhausted, an undertaker was sent to measure the old ladies for their coffins; and next day a hearse drew up at their door to convey them to their graves, which had been dug according to order in the St. Andrew’s churchyard.
This was more than the ladies could bear. They shut up the house and left Plymouth. But this was also the end of Robert’s stay with his grandfather. The good doctor had endured a great deal, but he would not put up with this; and Robert was sent to Stratton, to his father.
When the boy left school at Liskeard, he was articled to a lawyer, Mr. Jacobson, at Plymouth, a wealthy man in good practice, first cousin to his mother; but this sort of profession did not at all approve itself to Robert’s taste, and he remained with Mr. Jacobson a few months only. Whether he then turned his thoughts towards going into holy orders, cannot be told; but he persuaded his aunt, Mrs. Hodgson, to send him to Cheltenham Grammar School.