CHILDHOOD, 9 



in Somerset. Before leaving his wife and children, he took 

 the house, No. i, Skinner Street, which is mentioned in the 

 above quotation. The sisters-in-law helped with the 

 furnishing, and life promised to be far more pleasant with 

 Hannah Gossc than ever before; but the protection of 

 these relations was tempered by a kind of conscious 

 condescension, and Thomas was not allowed to forget that 

 he had been guilty of a mesalliance. I have heard my 

 grandmother describe how deep an impression was made 

 upon her by the loneliness of her first winter in Poole. 

 She was timid and not a little inclined to superstition, and 

 she had newly come into what seemed to her a large house, 

 with not a soul to relieve her nocturnal solitude, except 

 her two sleeping babies. She used to keep them in a crib 

 in the parlour till she went to bed, as some feeble company. 

 These painful feelings were much increased by a terrifying 

 circumstance, which was never satisfactorily accounted for. 

 There was no shutter to the back-parlour window, and late 

 one dark evening, in the depth of the winter of 1812, one 

 of the bottom panes was suddenly smashed, by no apparent 

 cause. Perhaps a cat had lost his footing on the tiles, and, 

 pitching on the sill, had rebounded against the glass. But 

 it was the last straw that broke my poor grandmother's 

 philosophy. 



Partly to increase her income, partly to lose this dreadful 

 sense of loneliness, Mrs. Gosse let some of her rooms as 

 lodgings. They were taken by two ladies of the name of 

 Bird, whose occupation was that of teaching a mysterious 

 art known as " Poonah painting " in private, but on their 

 printed advertisement described as "Oriental tinting." A 

 good many young ladies came to learn ; but the fair pro- 

 fessors affected great secrecy in their process, and bound 

 their pupils by a solemn pledge to keep the secret of " the 

 Indian formulas." This greatly stimulated Mrs. Gosse's 



