door, was separated from the room only by a piece of pasted paper; and through this paper the cat’s head suddenly emerged.  “Cat, you bitch!” said old Mrs Wilding, and my father could read no more.  Nay, his father (then in his last illness) laughed too when he heard the story.

The average age of those old Guildhall people must have been much over sixty, and some of them were nearly centenarians—Charity Herring, who was always setting fire to her bed with a worn-out warming-pan, and James Burrows, of whom my father made this jotting in one of his note-books: “In the year 1853 I buried James

Burrows of this parish at the reputed age of one hundred years.  Probably he was nearly, if not altogether that age.  Talking with him a few years before his death, I asked if his father had lived to be an old man, and he said that he had.  I asked him then about his grandfather, and his answer was that he had lived to be a ‘wonnerful owd man.’  ‘Do you remember your grandfather?’  ‘Right well: I was a big bor when he died.’  ‘Did he use to tell you of things which he remembered?’  ‘Yes, he was wery fond of talking about ’em: he used to say he could remember the Dutch king coming over.’  James Burrows could not read or write, nor his father probably before him: so that this statement must have been based on purely traditional grounds.  Assume he was born in 1755 he would have been a ‘big bor,’ fifteen years old, in 1770; and assume that his grandfather died in 1770 aged ninety-six, this would make him to have been born in 1675, fourteen or fifteen years before William of Orange landed.”

Then there were Tom and Susan Kemp.  He came from somewhere in Norfolk, the scene, I remember, of the ‘Babes in the Wood,’ and he wore the only smock-frock in the parish, where the ruling fashion was “thunder-and-lightning” sleeve-waistcoats.  Susan’s Sunday dress was a clean lilac print gown, made very

short, so as to show white stockings and boots with cloth tops.  Over the dress was pinned a little black shawl, and her bonnet was unusually large, of black velvet or silk, with a great white frill inside it.  She was troubled at times with a mysterious complaint called “the wind,” which she thus described, her finger tracing the course it followed within her: “That fare to go round and round, and then out ta come a-raspin’ and a-roarin’.”  Another of her ailments was swelled ankles.  “Oh, Mr Groome!” she would say, “if yeou could but see my poare legs, yeou’d niver forget ’em;” and then, if not stopped, she would proceed to pull up her short gown and show them.  If my father had been out visiting more than to her seemed wise, she would, when he told her where he had been to, say: “Ah! there yeou go a-rattakin’ about, and when yeou dew come home yeou’ve a cowd, I’ll be bound,” which often enough was the case.  Susan’s contempt was great for poor folks dressing up their children smartly; and she would say with withering scorn, “What do har child want with all them wandykes?”—vandykes being lace trimmings of any sort.  Was it of spoilt children that she spoke as “hectorin’ and bullockin’ about”?—certainly it was of one of us, a late riser, that she said, “I’d soon out-of-bed har if I lived there.”

Susan’s treatment of Harry Collins, a crazy man subject to fits, was wise and kind.  Till Harry came to live with the Kemps, he had been kept in bed to save trouble.  Susan would have no more of bed for him than for ordinary folks, but sent him on many errands and kept him in excellent order.  Her commands to him usually began with, “Co’, Henry, be stirrin’;” and he stood in wholesome awe of her, and obeyed her like a child.  His fits were curious, for “one minute he’d be cussin’ and swearin’, and the next fall a-prayin’.”  Once, too, he “leapt out of the winder like a roebuck.”  Blind James Seaman, the other occupant of Susan’s back-room, came of good old yeoman ancestry.  He wore a long blue coat with brass buttons; and his favourite seat was the sunny bank near our front gate.

In the room over Susan Kemp’s lived Will Ruffles and his wife, a very faithful old couple.  The wife failed first.  She had hurt herself a good deal with a fall down the rickety stairs.  Will saw to her to the last, and watched carefully over her.  The schoolmistress then, a Miss Hindmarsh, took a great liking for the old man; and a friend of hers, a widow lady in London, though she had never seen him, made him a regular weekly allowance to the end of his life—two shillings, half-a-crown, and sometimes more.  This gave Will many little comforts.  Once

when my sister took him his allowance, he told her how, when he was a young man, a Gipsy woman told him he should be better off at the end of his life than at the beginning; and “she spŏok truth,” he said, “but how she knew it I coon’t säa.”  Will suffered at times from rheumatism, and had great faith in some particular green herb pills, which were to be bought only at one particular shop in Ipswich.  My sister was once deputed to buy him a box of these pills, and he told her afterwards, “Them there pills did me a lot of good, and that show what fŏoks säa about rheumatics bein’ in the boones ain’t trew, for how could them there pills ’a got into the boones?”  He was very fond of my father, whom he liked to joke with him.  “Mr Groome,” he once said, “dew mob me so.”

Will, like many other old people in the parish, believed in witchcraft,—was himself, indeed, a “wise man” of a kind.  My father once told him about a woman who had fits.  “Ah!” old Will said, “she’ve fallen into bad hands.”  “What do you mean?” asked my father; and then Will said that years before in Monk Soham there was a woman took bad just like this one, and “there wern’t but me and John Abbott in the place could git her right.”  “What did you do?” said my father.  “We two, John and I, sat by a clear fire; and we had to bile

some of the clippins of the woman’s nails and some of her hair; and when ta biled”—he paused.  “What happened?” asked my father; “did you hear anything?”  “Hear anything!  I should think we did.  When ta biled, we h’ard a loud shrike a-roarin’ up the chimley; and yeou may depind upon it, she warn’t niver bad no more.”

Once my father showed Will a silhouette of his father, old Mr Groome of Earl Soham, a portly gentleman, dressed in the old-fashioned style.  “Ruffles, who is this?” he asked, knowing that Will had known his father well, and thinking he would recognise it.  After looking at it carefully for some time, Will said, “That’s yar son, the sailor.”  My eldest brother at that time might be something over twenty, and bore not the faintest resemblance to our grandfather; still, Will knew that he had been much abroad, and fancied a tropical sun might have blackened him.

By his own accounts, Will’s feats of strength as a younger man, in the way of reaping, mowing, &c., were remarkable; and there was one great story, with much in it about “goolden guineas,” of the wonderful sale of corn that he effected for one of his masters.  At the rectory gatherings on Christmas night Will was one of the principal singers, his chef-d’œuvre “Oh! silver [query

Sylvia] is a charming thing,” and “The Helmingham Wolunteers.”  That famous corps