MAER] 5 1 



CHAPTER IV 

 MAER 



Maer Hall The children of Josiah Wedgwood A picnic at Trentham 

 Emma Caldwell's picture of life at Maer Emma Darwin's 

 comment seventy-two years later Emma's childhood. 



WE now leave the earlier life in which the group of Aliens 

 are the chief figures, and take up the story of Emma 

 Wedgwood. Josiah Wedgwood of Maer had nine children, 

 of whom eight lived to grow up. Emma was the youngest 

 child, born May 2nd, 1808. 



Maer Hall, where Emma spent her life till she married, 

 was so deeply beloved by the whole group that their 

 children even have inherited a kind of sacred feeling about it. 

 In the time of the Wedgwoods it was a large, unpretending 

 stone house, Elizabethan in date; on the garden side 

 there was an old and picturesque porch with its pillars left 

 unaltered ; but the latticed windows had been sashed accord- 

 ing to the taste of the time. It stood on a slope leading 

 down to a small lake or mere, from which it took its name. 

 This mere was fed by springs so that the water was clear. 

 " Capability Brown," the well-known landscape gardener 

 of those days, had turned its marshy end, next the house, 

 into a kind of fish's tail, as my mother used to describe it. 

 There was a boat on the pool, as they always called it, 

 which was a great joy to the young people and children, 

 and there was good skating in winter. Round it there was 

 a delightful up-and-down sandy walk a mile in length, 

 diversified and well wooded, which made one of the charms 

 of the place. The garden, bright and gay with old-fashioned 

 flowers, lay between the house and the pool, and the little 

 church was just outside the domain. My father used to 

 say that our mother only cared for flowers which had grown 

 at Maer. There was a great deal of wild heath and wood 

 around, and the country is, even now, as rural as ever and 



