looked at its crumbled and irregular wall, from which the turf had peeled or been washed away; at the tangled growth of grasses and weeds round the top, crenellated with many a breach and gap; and the hollow, now choked up with luxuriant evergreens that overtopped the inclosure and forbade entrance to it, and thought of my mother’s work and my girlish play there, and was glad to see her old sand-heap was still standing, though her planting had, with the blessing of time, made it impenetrable to me.

Our cottage was the last decent dwelling on that side of the village; between ourselves and the heath and pine wood there was one miserable shanty, worthy of the poorest potato patch in Ireland.  It was inhabited by a ragged ruffian of the name of E——­, whose small domain we sometimes saw undergoing arable processes by the joint labor of his son and heir, a ragged ruffian some sizes smaller than himself, and of a half-starved jackass, harnessed together to the plow he was holding; occasionally the team was composed of the quadruped and a tattered and fierce-looking female biped, a more terrible object than even the man and boy and beast whose labors she shared.

On the other side our nearest neighbors, separated from us by the common and its boundary road, were a family of the name of ——­, between whose charming garden and pretty residence and our house a path was worn by a constant interchange of friendly intercourse.

I followed no regular studies whatever during our summer at Weybridge.  We lived chiefly in the open air, on the heath, in the beautiful wood above the meadows of Brooklands, and in the neglected, picturesque inclosure of Portmore Park, whose tenantless, half-ruined mansion, and noble cedars, with the lovely windings of the river Wey in front, made it a place an artist would have delighted to spend his hours in.

We haunted it constantly for another purpose.  My mother had a perfect passion for fishing, and would spend whole days by the river, pursuing her favorite sport.  We generally all accompanied her, carrying baskets and tackle and bait, kettles and camp stools, and looking very much like a family of gypsies on the tramp.  We were each of us armed with a rod, and were more or less interested in the sport.  We often started after an early breakfast, and, taking our luncheon with us, remained the whole day long absorbed in our quiet occupation.

My mother was perfectly unobservant of all rules of angling, in her indiscriminate enthusiasm, and “took to the water” whether the wind blew, the sun shone, or the rain fell; fishing—­under the most propitious or unpropitious circumstances—­was not, indeed, necessarily, catching fish, but still, fishing; and she was almost equally happy whether she did or did not catch any thing.  I have known her remain all day in patient expectation of the “glorious nibble,” stand through successive showers, with her clothes between whiles drying on her back, and only reluctantly leave the water’s edge when it was literally too dark to see her float.