60 My New Zealand Garden 



tell my aunt of the reprieve of a notorious criminal, 

 and in reply to my uncle's remark that the death 

 sentence should have been carried out, I unfortu- 

 nately chimed in : ' Perhaps a great many people 

 deserve hanging who escape it.' I then and there 

 understood what a worthless seventeen-year-old 

 chit I was. 



I have met all six uncles at a family dinner- 

 party, where the manners and customs of the 

 previous generation formed a common topic of 

 conversation, interspersed with the names of a 

 famous few who could contain most port ! I 

 gathered that my uncles' generation compared 

 very favourably with the past, and for talking 

 witty nonsense I thought no generation could 

 compare with their own. The Vicarage was the 

 chief seat of these family gatherings, where hos- 

 pitality, wine, and conversation flowed without 

 the least restriction. My uncle was Vicar of the 

 same parish for about forty years, and was as well 

 established and satisfied as the Vicar of Bray. 

 He was kind, charitable, and liberal to an ex- 

 treme, and his parochial duties seemed to flow on 

 so silently and quietly that I sometimes wondered 

 whether there could have been any. They were 

 carried on in close conjunction with a farm, with 

 which they did not appear to clash. His daily drives 

 in a pony-gig, as that kind was then called, to the 

 nearest market town, a distance of three miles, 



