to eat the gooseberries without stint.  The mill-life, too, was inexpressibly attractive—­the dark chamber with the great, green, dripping wheel in it, so awfully mysterious as the central life of the whole structure; the machinery connected with the wheel—­I knew not how; the hole where the roach lay by the side of the mill-tail in the eddy; the haunts of the water-rats which we used to hunt with Spot, the black and tan terrier, and the still more exciting sport with the ferrets—­ all this drew me down the lane perpetually.  I liked, and even loved Mrs. Butts, too, for her own sake.  Her kindness to me was unlimited, and she was never overcome with the fear of “spoiling me,” which seemed the constant dread of most of my hostesses.  I never lost my love for her.  It grew as I grew, despite my mother’s scarcely suppressed hostility to her, and when I heard she was ill, and was likely to die, I went to be with her.  She was eighty years old then.  I sat by her bedside with her hand in mine.  I was there when she passed away, and—­but I have no mind and no power to say any more, for all the memories of her affection and of the sunny days by the water come over me and prevent the calmness necessary for a chronicle.  She with all her faults and eccentricities will always have in my heart a little chapel with an ever-burning light.  She was one of the very very few whom I have ever seen who knew how to love a child.

Mrs. Butts and George had one son who was named Clement.  He was exactly my own age, and naturally we were constant companions.  We went to the same school.  He never distinguished himself at his books, but he was chief among us.  He had a versatile talent for almost every accomplishment in which we delighted, but he was not supreme in any one of them.  There were better cricketers, better football players, better hands at setting a night-line, better swimmers than Clem, but he could do something, and do it well, in all these departments.  He generally took up a thing with much eagerness for a time, and then let it drop.  He was foremost in introducing new games and new fashions, which he permitted to flourish for a time, and then superseded.  As he grew up he displayed a taste for drawing and music.  He was soon able to copy little paintings of flowers, or even little country scenes, and to play a piece of no very great difficulty with tolerable effect.  But as he never was taught by a master, and never practised elementary exercises and studies, he was deficient in accuracy.  When the question came what was to be done with him after he left school, his father naturally wished him to go into the mill.  Clem, however, set his face steadily against this project, and his mother, who was a believer in his genius, supported him.  He actually wanted to go to the University, a thing unheard of in those days amongst our people; but this was not possible, and after dangling about for some time at home, he obtained the post of usher in a school, an occupation