Chapter 22 Souvenirs 
MONGST numerous odds and ends 
that awaken my memories of Farn- 
borough or of the Smith family, I view 
with some antiquarian sentiment a 
genealogy of my grandfather, William Smith the 
potter—John Smith’s father. This genealogy 
traces William Smith’s ancestry back to 1708, and 
gives the date 1764 for the birth of his mother 
—that ‘“‘carnayin”’ old cottage woman shown 
beside her hearth in the book about him. How 
her maiden name was Ann Paige, how she was 
married to Thomas Smith (my great-grandfather) 
as a young woman of sixteen in 1780, and was 
widowed twenty years afterwards, is of small 
importance now or of none at all; and equally 
unimportant is the nature of the document—its 
odd spelling, its quill-pen writing—in which 
these things are recorded. I cannot even sur- 
mise who wrote the record, or why it stops at 
1805; and it is only of the very faintest interest, 
and to me alone, that I may have seen one man 
mentioned in this genealogy. Richard Young, 
farmer at Ash, was certainly a very old man when 
I knew him slightly, about 1886. He was a 
man to be esteemed—though by no means for 
his wealth. ‘Tall and straight, very thin, grey- 
| 166 
