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Autobiographical notes of the life of William Bell Scott
Autobiographical notes of the life of William Bell Scott Author:William Bell Scott Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II THE HOUSEHOLD I Wish I could indicate in some measure the peculiar character of the members of the household, who seemed to the child indivisibl... more »y a part of the domicile itself. To do this as they then appeared to him, ignorant of every other experience, it is in vain to try, simply because the successive slides in the magic lantern of life are removed to make way for the next to come. Both the parents of the family of four children of which I was the third were rather advanced in middle age; so much so as to appear prodigiously aged to the juvenile apprehension. Not that the dear mother could have touched the mezzo cammino when I first remember her, since the youngest child, the " little sister," was only two years younger than myself; but she had left off the style of youth with its ways, wearing a white cap frilled with lace and a shawl even within the house, and from morning to night. These garments, one begins to think, were the fashion of the day, as even in portraits of the early part of the century children with their largewhite caps are to be seen. She was short and stout, slow and quiet: we were a second family, and the mother's heart had been buried with the first. It is unnecessary to say over again what has been recorded in the Memoir of my brother.1 Yet it was to me more especially, as I was her favourite I used to think, that the feeling was more particularly apparent. The name she often called me was not William but Lockhart, that having been the name of a favourite now in heaven. With an expression of sadness that puzzled and somewhat humiliated me, she used to correct herself, but I wished I could be Lockhart to her. Her mistake gave me a glimpse into a sort of antediluvian past, a primitive age passed in a Garden of Eden we should try to make ...« less