CHISWICK HOUSE 
afternoons, in summer-time, regularly at five o’clock, there was a 
service of some sort or other in the grounds. We always supposed 
that there was a graveyard there; and, during many years, we 
children never failed to rush upstairs the instant we caught the 
strain of a certain processional hymn, to watch from our top windows 
the glint of lighted candles among the trees, and catch glimpses 
of veiled figures, white and black, and slowly-moving banners. 
I do not know the music to which the nuns walked, but I remember 
it well, and if I could hear that same tuneful hymn again, in any 
place, and in any circumstances, it would bring the whole scene 
back to me. So strong are the impressions of childhood, and so 
powerful the association of ideas and memory with music ! 
The nuns were good neighbours: One day one of my brothers, 
to our great consternation, fell over the wall on to a bed of soft 
cabbages. They picked him up, treated him kindly, and sent 
him home by the road; and the next morning they came to the 
base of the wall and handed up, on a long stick, a beautiful moth 
for ‘“‘ the little boy who had fallen over.” 
Our garden was much more ancient than the house, having 
once formed part of the demesne of a large mansion, said to have 
been long ago destroyed by fire. It abounded in fruit ; old goose- 
berry bushes, raspberries, and currants, black, white, and red. 
There was one spot near the strawberry-beds where the rosy stalks 
of the rhubarb held up their giant leaves like plates, in order, as 
it were, to catch, or break the fall of, the yellow apricots that 
dropped from a tree above them, quite beyond our reach. Such 
windfalls were windfalls indeed ! 
The garden was rich in fruit-trees of various kinds, particularly 
in apple-trees, all twisted and knotted, and gnarled with age ; 
but still yielding fruit plentifully. The flavour of some of these 
apples, no Newtown Pippin, or Blenheim Orange of the present 
day, can approach. 
April, in our garden, was a reminder of a snowy January; only 
the snow did not completely cover the grass, and on the trees it 
was dashed here and there with rose and pink. The old Ribstone 
Pippin that faced the drawing-room windows was covered with 
bloom, and was in itself the very incarnation of the spirit of Spring. 
On the right-hand corner of the lawn a Russet stood sentinel 
over the flower-beds. Near it a plum tree, past bearing fruit, wept 
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