I 



CHILDHOOD. 7 



astonishing power of memory which was to accompany 

 him through life. " I was in my mother's arms," he wrote 

 in a memorandum dated 1868, ''at the bottom of the 

 front garden [at Titton], where it was divided by a hedge 

 from the road. There came by a team of oxen or horses, 

 driven by a peasant who guided them by his voice : — ' Gee, 

 Captain ! Wo, Merryman ! ' These two names I vividly 

 recollect, and the whole scene." He never again visited 

 Titton Brook, and it is certain that no portion of the im- 

 pression could be derived from later knowledge. Travel- 

 ling by Birmingham and Salisbury, the Gosses came, in 

 June, 18 12, to Poole, and settled in furnished lodgings in 

 the Old Orchard. 



The borough and county of the borough of Poole, to 

 give it its full honours, possessed in those days a population 

 of about six thousand souls. It was a prosperous little 

 town, whose good streets, sufficiently broad and well paved, 

 were lined with solid and comfortable red-brick houses. 

 The upper part of the borough was clean, the sandy soil 

 on which it was built aiding a rapid drainage after rain. 

 The lower streets, such as the sea end of Lagland and Fish 

 Streets, the Strand, and the lanes abutting on the Quay, 

 were filthy enough ; while the nose was certainly not 

 regaled by the reeking odours of the Quay itself, with its 

 stores and piles of salt cod, its ranges of barrels of train 

 oil, its rope and tar and turpentine, and its well-stocked 

 shambles for fresh fish, sometimes too obviously in the 

 act of becoming stale fish. Yet, among seaport towns, its 

 character was one of exceptional sweetness and cleanliness. 

 And here, though the memory is one of some years' later 

 date, I may print my father's impression of the Poole of his 

 early childhood : — 



" The Quay, with its shipping and sailors ; their songs, 

 " and cries of ' Heave with a will, yoho 1 ' the busy mer- 



