Souvenirs 
Strong rustic influences from the Ash ancestry; 
but his mother’s attitude could not fail to be 
affected by the R. Martins or other seniors who 
had hobnobbed with her father and mother 
during her girlhood in London. As I look 
upon the coin the inn at Westminster grows 
cloudy again with tobacco-smoke; shrewd talk, 
with plenty of common-sense, clatters across the 
rooms. It is gone now. It is nothing. And 
yet, did not that five-shilling piece stand for one 
of the influences that still coloured Susannah 
Blackburn’s behaviour at Farnborough years 
afterwards, when my uncle John Smith was a 
little boy? It suggests, to me, why he grew 
up a bit more nimble of wit than so many of his 
social equals; why a larger outlook than that of 
Farnborough swayed him; why he had the 
habit of looking at things from a national point 
of view. His mother was used to hearing talk 
of that character in the inn parlour down by the 
river, from men like R. Martin, Senr. who gave 
her this crown-piece. She amongst the glasses 
heard it; a century later, echoes of similar talk 
reached myself in John Smith’s chatter. 
These things—the coin and the genealogy— 
had both been put away and I had forgotten 
them until this book was all but done. But in 
the meantime another souvenir with its own odd 
mode of suggestion had come into my hands, 
F7i 
