Balls Park was a typical English house, birds, bees, butterflies, honeysuckle, roses. Our visits there were almost always in the “sweete season that budde and blossom brings,” and my remembrance of the place is invariably connected with summer. Here were cousins too, and many of them to whom I was very much attached, though they were greatly my seniors; no one ever was so rich in cousins. I remember once meeting the late Lord Carlisle at dinner at Charles Dickens’. “Mary Boyle is a cousin of mine,” said Lord Carlisle. “I suppose so,” replied Dickens; “I have never yet met any one who was _not_ her cousin.” [Sidenote: TAMING A WOLF-DOG] Another house was Wigan Rectory, in Lancashire, a very different locality indeed. A frightful, black, manufacturing town, but we loved to go there, for my uncle George Bridgeman and his wife were most indulgent to us children.[20] Mr Bridgeman had first married my father’s, and after her death my mother’s, sister, and both husband and wife were our kind playfellows, taking an interest in all our little pastimes, and rich in that quality, so dear to childish hearts, of genuine fun. My aunt Louisa was devoted to gardening, and although her pleasure grounds were circumscribed, she took the greatest delight therein. I fear I wounded her horticultural nature on one occasion, when I complained that the rose I had just picked smelt of soot, and blacked my nose when raised thereto! In the backyard of the Rectory a magnificent wolf-dog lived in the kennel, the object of universal terror among the servants and gardeners. But I believed in and trusted dogs, and my firm conviction was that Lupus was misunderstood. I bribed the servants to let me feed him, which I did first at a respectful distance, advancing nearer and nearer each day as I presented him with his dinner. At length I deemed him tamed, and, not without slight trepidation, I approached, let slip his collar, and opened the garden gate. Never shall I forget the consternation which the apparition of girl and dog caused in my aunt’s little sitting-room which opened on the lawn. She was talking to my mother in this sanctum when she saw Lupus bounding over the grass, and standing on the threshold of her boudoir. With a loud cry the Rector’s wife jumped upon the chair, gathering her skirts around her, and summoning her juvenile protectress to call off the dog! But Lupus did no harm; he was only elated by his new-born freedom, and he became from that day the constant companion of the daily walks I took with my youngest brother and our nurse. Footnote 20: Rev. George Bridgeman married, in 1792, Lady Lucy Boyle, only daughter of Edmund, seventh Earl of Cork. She died in 1801, and he married in 1809, Charlotte Louisa, daughter of William Poyntz of Midgham.