I feel that if I go maundering on much longer about my children, some one will exclaim with a witty and delightful author when he saw “Peter Pan” for the seventh time:  “Oh, for an hour of Herod!” When I think of little Edy bringing me in minute branches of flowers all the morning, with the reassuring intelligence that “there are lots more,” I could cry.  But why should any one be interested in that?  Is it interesting to any one else that when she dug up a turnip in the garden for the first time, she should have come running in to beg me to come quick:  “Miss Edy found a radish.  It’s as big as—­as big as God!”

When I took her to her first theater—­it was Sanger’s Circus—­and the clown pretended to fall from the tightrope, and the drum went bang! she said:  “Take me away! take me away! you ought never to have brought me here!” No wonder she was considered a dour child!  I immediately and humbly obeyed.

It was truly the simple life we led in Hertfordshire.  From scrubbing floors and lighting fires, cooking, gardening, and harnessing the pony, I grew thinner than ever—­as thin as a whipping-post, a hurdle, or a haddock!  I went to church in blue-and-white cotton, with my servant in silk.  “I don’t half like it,” she said.  “They’ll take you for the cook, and me for the lady!”

We kept a goat, a dear fellow whom I liked very much until I caught him one day chasing my daughter.  I seized him by his horns to inflict severe punishment; but then I saw that his eyes were exactly like mine, and it made me laugh so much that I let him go and never punished him at all.

“Boo” became an institution in these days.  She was the wife of a doctor who kept a private asylum in the neighboring village, and on his death she tried to look after the lunatics herself.  But she wasn’t at all successful!  They kept escaping, and people didn’t like it.  This was my gain, for “Boo” came to look after me instead, and for the next thirty years I was her only lunatic, and she my most constant companion and dear and loyal friend.

We seldom went to London.  When we did, Ted nearly had a fit at seeing so many “we’els go wound.”  But we went to Normandy, and saw Lisieux, Mantes, Bayeux.  Long afterwards, when I was feeling as hard as sandpaper on the stage, I had only to recall some of the divine music I had heard in those great churches abroad to become soft, melted, able to act.  I remember in some cathedral we left little Edy sitting down below while we climbed up into the clerestory to look at some beautiful piece of architecture.  The choir were practicing, and suddenly there rose a boy’s voice, pure, effortless, and clear....  For years that moment stayed with me.  When we came down to fetch Edy, she said: 

“Ssh! ssh!  Miss Edy has seen the angels!”

Oh, blissful quiet days!  How soon they came to an end!  Already the shadow of financial trouble fell across my peace.  Yet still I never thought of returning to the stage.