[Illustration: THE OLD MARKET PLACE, READING] In the year 1804 the building of the large new house at Graseley was completed, and it received the name of Bertram House, so called in honour of the Mitfords’ Norman ancestor, Sir Robert Bertram. The doctor’s usual extravagance was shown in the style of its decorations and furniture, which were little suited to his small and modest family. We have visited Bertram House. It is a large square white building of little architectural beauty, but there is beauty in a wide verandah standing at the summit of a broad flight of stone steps leading up to the entrance, which is completely festooned by roses and honeysuckles. The house faces spreading lawns and gay flower-beds, whilst its approach from the lane hard by is beneath an avenue of tall limes. Fields stretch far away behind the building, their “richly timbered hedgerows edging into wild, rude and solemn fir plantations.” Here Mary Mitford passed sixteen years of her life, and here she got to know and love not only their own beautiful grounds but also every turn of the surrounding shady lanes, where the first violets and primroses were to be found, and delighted in the wide expanse of its neighbouring common gay with gorse and broom. Many of her pastoral stories are connected with this smiling country. [Illustration] CHAPTER XIII A NORTHERN TOUR In the autumn of the year 1806 Mary Mitford, then eighteen years of age, was taken by her father for a tour in the north of England with a view of introducing her to his relations in Northumberland. The head of the family was Mitford of Mitford Castle, a fine old Saxon edifice that stands on high ground above the river Wansbeck at a point where two fords meet, and from which circumstance the name Mid-ford is derived. Miss Mitford speaks in her _Recollections_ of “the massive ruins of the castle” as “the common ancestral home of our race and name,” and tells us “of the wild and daring Wansbeck almost girdling it as a moat.” The castle is about two miles distant from Morpeth, and there is a quaint rhyme still current in the north-country which runs as follows:— “Midford was Midford ere Morpeth was ane, And still shall be Midford when Morpeth is gane.” At the time of the Norman Conquest it appears that the castle and barony were in the possession of a certain Robert de Mitford, whose only child and heiress was a daughter named Sibella. This daughter was given in marriage by the Conqueror to one of his knights—Sir Robert Bertram—who had fought in the battle of Hastings. It seems that there is a curious entry respecting this same knight in a contemporary document written in Norman French to the effect that Sir Robert Bertram _estoít tort_ (crooked). One would like to know if the Saxon maid was happy with her deformed husband, but the old chronicles are of course silent on that subject.[3] [Footnote 3: See _Memories_, by Lord Redesdale, K.C.B., published 1915.]