My mother has very often told me of her joy at the arrival of the pretty new mamma, who looked so sweet, and took her in her arms so kindly, as if she felt it a real comfort to find this little one prepared to love her, and to whom she might try to be a real mother. Not quite as she would have wished though, as she soon found out, for that would not have fallen in with my grandfather’s views. He wanted his wife for himself, and expected her to be constantly in her own rooms awaiting his good will and pleasure, and not that he should perhaps be told if he went to look for her there, that she had gone upstairs to the schoolroom or nursery. It was for this reason that my mother in her turn had to continue leading a lonely life in her childhood, only seeing her parents at stated hours, and ever in the greatest dread of her father, who, if he were annoyed at anything, generally, I regret to say, laid about him with his riding-whip pretty freely. Such energetic modes of enforcing obedience or expressing disapproval were already somewhat going out of fashion in my childhood, and I am glad to think how many children there now are who have never received a blow, and are wholly free from the terrorising influences under which earlier generations grew up. My mother’s first impression of her stepmother was, as I have said, one of pure enthusiasm. She was old enough to feel the charm of a pretty face, and to observe the pride her father took in his young wife’s beauty, and the intense satisfaction he felt in witnessing the admiration she excited. He was rather fond of teasing his little daughter with the prospect of very soon finding a husband for her, to which the little girl would reply quite gravely--“No, I do not mean ever to get married!” And her father would cast an enquiring glance at his wife, as if wondering whether she had the air of a victim of the marriage yoke, to be however promptly reassured by her smile of unaffected amusement at the child’s ingenuousness. Grandmamma’s first baby did not live, but she had in course of time four other children, who were to the little elder sister a source of unfailing delight. She would amuse them for hours, telling them the most wonderful stories, which she made up herself, and the little ones simply adored her. For her own elder brothers my mother had, as I shall have occasion to relate, an almost passionate attachment. I must speak of them in their own place, but in this sort of family history, the lives are all so mixed up together, and have so many points of contact, one must from time to time let a side-light fall on some, whose turn to be treated at length has not yet come.