write, and when nine years old her mother wrote: "Little Ellie has taken to writing stories, and uncommonly good they are. I shall keep them for your The father's reply was: "Don't make too much of Ellie's stories; teach her to be active and regular in her duties". amusement." Her day-dreams were, of course, much fostered by her delicacy of health and weak eyes, which enforced long hours of idleness. She often had to wear a shade, and, when her eyes were very bad, live under the dining-room table. But when quietly sitting there among the footstools, she was in imagination having wonderful adventures in far-away countries, and seeing in her mind the most beautiful pictures and the most interesting people. Her sufferings never made Edna Lyall the least self-engrossed, but rather were all her life considered as experience-the "learning of a language, to enable her to understand others". One is reminded of Robertson's words on the "Son of Consolation," who, in order to have the perfect gift of sympathy, something beyond commonplace consolation and the delicate tact which never inflicts pain, must be content to pay the price of the costly education and even as his Master must suffer. Looking at the end of her life and seeing the result of this "costly education," one is apt to forget that it ever was acquired, and in later days her acquaintance would never have guessed the existence of the "hot temper and peppery disposition" which needed all her strength of character and vigorous self-control to keep in abeyance. What a very natural and delightful description that is of the "Ministering Children" in The Burges Letters, the reaction after the good work done in the "best Ministering Children style" which ended in a wordy war and bed. To her contemporaries the reminiscences of the early sixties are especially interesting, and one wishes that all parents of those days had been as wise as Mr. and Mrs. Bayly in forbidding The Fairchild Family and Foxe's Book of Martyrs. The wholesome love of good literature was encouraged in Edna Lyall and her sisters by the reading aloud of poetry, the Waverley Novels, Roman history, Kingsley's Heroes, etc. Music was a favourite recreation; the family were all musical, and even as children had sweet voices, and they were very fond of singing rounds and catches, started by the elder sister with her little tuning-fork. Brighton, of course, was a large town even in those days, and though, when the summer came, the little girls were sent down to the beach almost every day in large leghorn flop hats and cool brown holland pinafores, the glare of the sun was trying for delicate eyes, and the children were frequently sent into the country to be refreshed by that delightful provision of nature, the greenness of grass and trees. Perhaps it was continually being compelled to live in the shade which gave Edna Lyall her love for bright colours, and it seems to have been a regret in her childhood that the mother did not share this partiality, but dressed her little girls very quietly, who often rebelled against the holland overalls and big plain pink sun-bonnets. Shermanbury, not very far from Brighton, was the favourite holiday resort for the family, and very delightful to town children must have been the freedom of country lanes, the gleaning in the harvest fields, and the drives all by themselves in the donkey-cart to the neighbouring country town. Farnham was also often visited in the summer, and there lived a large family of cousins to add to the joy of the holidays. In the introduction to Mr. Gordon Home's booklet on Farnham and its Surroundings Edna Lyall writes: “Farnham has been my holiday home ever since I was four years old. Also in a sense I belong to the place, for my great-grandfather Newnham, a doctor, lived and died there, and his descendants still live in the town-indeed till three years ago [written in 1900] still lived in the same dear old two-storeyed house in West Street, whose plain grey front told so little of the cosiness within, or of the delights of the long-walled garden stretching down to the canal. Farnham, as I first remember it in the sixties, had a most picturesque old market-place, but on one day of the week walking was a terror to children used only to Brighton streets, for was there not a sale of live stock, when fearful horned beasts used to make us rush up Castle Street ? To be sure, there were also horned beasts in the park, our favourite playground, but they were amenable creatures intent on eating; and there were so many other delights in the park that we could contrive to forget them. There were hawthorn trees to be climbed-one memorable one very near the castle was large enough to accommodate the whole cousinhood, five Brightonians and seven Farnham cousins. Then there was the great elm avenue with its long, stately, Cathedral-like aisle, and beyond one could generally catch glimpses of the bishop's deer with their branching antlers. . . "Old Bishop Sumner's arrival at church on Sundays in great state used to make an immense impression on us-indeed the most ecclesiastical member of the family once made bold to touch the hem of his garment as he passed in! I am bound to confess that my memories of the kindly old bishop are much more mundane, and that, caring not at all for his episcopal robes, I thought his castle the most ideal place for games of hide-and-seek a few years later with his grandchildren, and have a specially keen remembrance of how after our game, in which an eerie terror of the haunted room mingled, we all repaired to the episcopal strawberry beds and feasted to our hearts' content. "The way up to the castle by the steps has always seemed to me one of the most quaint and picturesque bits of the little town; to us it suggested that part of The Pilgrim's Progress where Christian, looking up, saw a lion on each side of the way: 'The lions were chained, but [like so many of us] he saw not the chains"." |