The Midsummer holiday, for better enjoyment of which Mr. Telford provided us with these luxuries, began usually on the fifteenth of May, or thereabouts;—my father’s birthday was the tenth; on that day I was always allowed to gather the gooseberries for his first gooseberry pie of the year, from the tree between the buttresses on the north wall of the Herne Hill garden; so that we could not leave before that festa. The holiday itself consisted in a tour for orders through half the English counties; and a visit (if the counties lay northward) to my aunt in Scotland. The mode of journeying was as fixed as that of our home life. We went from forty to fifty miles a day, starting always early enough in the morning to arrive comfortably to four-o’clock dinner. Generally, therefore, getting off at six o’clock, a stage or two were done before breakfast, with the dew on the grass, and first scent from the hawthorns: if in the course of the midday drive there were any gentleman’s house to be seen,—or, better still, a lord’s—or, best of all, a duke’s,—my father baited the horses, and took my mother and me reverently through the state rooms; always speaking a little under our breath to the housekeeper, major domo, or other authority in charge; and gleaning worshipfully what fragmentary illustrations of the history and domestic ways of the family might fall from their lips. My father had a quite infallible natural judgment in painting; and though it had never been cultivated so as to enable him to understand the Italian schools, his sense of the power of the nobler masters in northern work was as true and passionate as the most accomplished artist’s. He never, when I was old enough to care for what he himself delighted in, allowed me to look for an instant at a bad picture; and if there were a Reynolds, Velasquez, Vandyck, or Rembrandt in the rooms, he would pay the surliest housekeepers into patience until we had seen it to heart’s content; if none of these, I was allowed to look at Guido, Carlo Dolce—or the more skilful masters of the Dutch school—Cuyp, Teniers, Hobbema, Wouwermans; but never at any second-rate or doubtful examples. I wonder how many of the lower middle class are now capable of going through a nobleman’s house, with judgment of this kind; and yet with entirely unenvious and reverent delight in the splendour of the abode of the supreme and beneficent being who allows them thus to enter his paradise? If there were no nobleman’s house to be seen, there was certainly, in the course of the day’s journey, some ruined castle or abbey; some celebrated village church, or stately cathedral. We had always unstinted time for these; and if I was at disadvantage because neither my father nor mother could tell me enough history to make the buildings authoritatively interesting, I had at least leisure and liberty to animate them with romance in my own fashion.