about this, so inquired where she had found it, and she turned to the Book of the Prophet Haggai—Hagar and Haggai to her were one and the same.  There was the manufacturer of artificial manures who set up a carriage and crest; and a friend asked my father what the motto would be.  “Mente et manu res,” was the ready answer.  There was the concert at Ipswich, where the chairman, a very precise young clergyman, announced that “the Rev. Robert Groome will sing (ahem!) ‘Thomas Bowling.’”  The song was a failure; my father each time was so sorely tempted to adopt the new version.  There was the old woman whom my father heard warning her daughter, about to travel for the first time by rail, “Whativer yeou do, my dear, mind yeou don’t sit nigh the biler.”  There was the old maiden lady, who every morning after breakfast read an Ode of Horace; and the other maiden lady, a kinswoman of my father’s, who practised her scales regularly long after she was sixty. 

She, if you crushed her in an argument, in turn crushed you with, “Well, there it is.”  There was much besides, but memory fails, and space.

From country clergyman to country archdeacon may seem no startling transition; yet it meant a great change in my father’s tranquil life.  For one thing it took him twice a-year up to London, to Convocation; and in London he met with many old friends and new.  Then there were frequent outings to Norwich, and the annual visitations and the Charge.  On the first day of his first visitation, at Eye, there was the usual luncheon, and the usual very small modicum of wine.  Lunch over, the Rev. Richard Cobbold, the author of ‘Margaret Catchpole,’ proposed my father’s health in a fervid oration, which wound up thus: “Gentlemen, I call upon you to drink the health of our new archdeacon,—to drink it, gentlemen, in flowing bumpers.”  It sounded glorious, but the decanters were empty; and my father had to order (and pay for) two dozen of sherry.  At an Ipswich visitation there was the customary roll-call of the clergy, among whom was a new-comer, a Scotchman, Mr Colquhoun.  “Mr—, Mr—,” faltered the apparitor, coming unexpectedly on this uncouth name; suddenly he rose a-tiptoe and to the emergency,—“Mr Cockahoon.”

In one of the deaneries my father found a churchyard

partly sown with wheat.  “Really, Mr Z---,” he said to the incumbent, “I must say I don’t like to see this.”  And the old churchwarden chimed in, “That’s what I säa tew, Mr Archdeacon; I säa to our parson, ‘Yeou go whatin’ it and whatin’ it, why don’t yeou tater it?’”  This found its way into ‘Punch,’ with a capital drawing by Charles Keene, whom my father met often at FitzGerald’s.  But there is another unrecorded story of an Irish clergyman, the Rev. “Lucius O’Grady.”  He had quarrelled with one of his churchwardens, whose name I forget; the other’s was Waller.  So my father went over to arbitrate between the disputants, and Mr “O’Grady” concluded an impassioned statement of his wrongs with “Voilà tout, Mr Archdeacon, voilà tout.”  “Waller tew,” quoth churchwarden No. 1; “what ha’ he to dew with it?”  And there was the visit to that woful church, damp, rotten, ruinous.  The inspection over, the rector said to my father, “Now, Mr Archdeacon, that we’ve done the old church, you must come and see my new stables.”  “Sir,” said my father, “when your church is in decent order, I shall be happy to see your new stables.”  And “the next time,” he told me, “I really could ask to see them.”

Two London reminiscences, and I have done.  A

former Monk Soham schoolmistress had married the usher of the Marlborough Street police court.  My father went to see them, and as he was coming away, an officious Irishman opened the cab-door for him, with “Good luck to your Rivirince, and did they let you off aizy?”  And once my father was waiting on one of the many platforms of Clapham Junction, when suddenly a fashionably dressed lady dropped on her knees before him, exclaiming, “Your blessing, holy Father.”  “God bless me!” cried my father,—then added quietly, “and you too, my dear lady.”

So at last I come to my father’s own Suffolk stories.  In 1877-78 I made my first venture in letters as editor for the ‘Ipswich Journal’ of a series of “Suffolk Notes and Queries.”  They ran through fifty-four numbers, my own set of which is, I fancy, almost unique.  I had a goodly list of contributors—all friends of my father’s—as Mr FitzGerald, Mr Donne, Captain Brooke of Ufford, Mr Chappell, Mr Aldis Wright, Bishop Ryle, and Professors Earle, Cowell, and Skeat.  Of them I was duly proud; still, my father and I wrote, between us, two-thirds of the whole.  He was the “Habitans in Alto” (High Suffolk, forsooth), alias “Rector,” alias “Philologus,” “Hippicus,” &c.—how we used to laugh at

those aliases.  Among his contributions were three papers on the rare old library of Helmingham Hall (Lord Tollemache’s), four on Samuel Ward, the Puritan preacher of Ipswich, three on Suffolk minstrelsy, and these sketches written in the Suffolk dialect.  Of that dialect my father was a past-master; once and once only did I know him nonplussed by a Suffolk phrase.  This was in the school at Monk Soham, where a small boy one day had been put in the corner.  “What for?” asked my father; and a chorus of voices answered, “He ha’ bin tittymatauterin,” which meant, it seems, playing at see-saw.  I retain, of course, my father’s own spelling; but he always himself maintained that to reproduce the dialect phonetically is next to impossible—that, for instance, there is a delicate nuance in the Suffolk pronunciation of dog, only faintly suggested by dawg.

I.
OLD TIMES.

Fŏoks alluz säa as they git old,
   That things look wusser evry day;
They alluz sed so, I consate;
   Leastwise I’ve h’ard my mother säa,

When she was growed up, a big gal,
   And went to sarvice at the Hall,
She han’t but one stuff gownd to wear,
   And not the lissest mite of shawl.

But now yeou cäan’t tell whue is whue;
   Which is the missus, which the maid,
There ain’t no tellin’; for a gal,
   Arter she’s got her wages paid,

Will put ’em all upon her back,
   And look as grand as grand can be;
My poor old mother would be stamm’d [39]
   Her gal should iver look like she.

And ’taint the lissest bit o’ use
   To tell ’em anything at all;
They’ll only lâff, or else begin
   All manner o’ hard names to call.

Praps arter all it ’tain’t the truth,
   That one time’s wusser than the t’other;
Praps I’m a-gittin’ old myself,
   And fare to talk like my old mother.

I shäan’t dew nowt by talkin’ so,
   I’d better try the good old plan,
Of spakin’ sparing of most folks,
   And dewin’ all the good I can.

J. D.

II.

My father used to repeat one stanza of an old song; I wonder whether the remainder