by one of my sisters. It was during this illness that she wrote "The Rosary," though it was not published for some years.

In 1909 and 1910 she visited America.

Outside calls became very numerous and her correspondence was enormous. The production of a long novel every year also took time. She therefore gradually handed over her village activities to other willing helpers, and faced the work of a larger sphere. Always, however, she clung to her post of organist, and would make every effort to be at home for Sundays, in order not to miss accompanying the services. Often this meant long and weary journeys, or the giving up of an attractive engagement; and latterly, when a very painful illness had attacked her, she would play the organ under conditions when most people would be lying on a couch, groaning. Her courage was indomitable, and it was impossible to persuade her not to go to the services, or to give up this or that engagement. As someone has well expressed it, "she had the courage of a hero and the heart and gaiety of a child."

This, then, is an outline of my mother's life at Hertford Heath. The history of these thirtynine years will be filled out and coloured in the chapters which follow.

V: OF SWIMMING AND OTHER SPORTS

THE picture of my mother would be in

complete were I to leave out her intense enjoyment of physical activity of every sort. It was simply her radiant health, her irrepressible energy seeking its natural outlet-for with her there was no thirst for competition, for mere exhibition, for the performance of feats.

As a matter of fact she excelled in every form of sport she took up, and had she cared to specialise in it, her physical strength, powers of endurance, courage, cool-headedness, quickness of eye and sure dexterity would have won for her a place in the ranks of the "champions." But she cared nothing for laurels. All she wanted was to satisfy her instinctive need of movement, to enjoy the feeling of abounding life to the full. So long as her own children and immediate friends shared her simple enthusiasm in the accomplishment of the moment that was all that mattered.

Though she enjoyed games, it was the purely natural activities, like walking, riding, swimming, that pleased her most. My mind is full of

brilliant little pictures of sunny scenes, my mother the centre of them, seeming to concentrate in her own personality all the sunshine, all the joy of existence, all the energy of human life. Here are some of the pictures that I see.

Blazing sunshine on the sparkling snow. Overhead a sky of pure, fathomless blue. On every side, some near and accessible, others vast and distant, range upon range of mountains, snowcovered, pine-clad. In the foreground, my mother, her face tanned to a wonderful bright brown, clad in a short skirt, and grasping a ski stick. All she wants is to get away, walking, walking, then climbing, on and on, up and up the steep mountain paths, until she is far up in the rare, cold air, among the brown rocks, the stubby firs, the stretches of untrodden snow. She takes with her one companion, a meagre meal of biscuits and fruit, and is gone. The rest of us take ourselves off to our more artificial forms of sport-tobogganing, ski-ing, skating; to the gay life of St. Moritz.

That evening, when the sky has turned a luminous green, the last streaks of orange already faded from it, as the first bright stars prick out and the twilight has transformed the shadowy