Of daily pictures, the one I recall with most vividness is my afternoon’s outing. I do not mean in my earliest years, when my nurse would wheel me out (by hand, for this was before the days of perambulators) down to the end of the drive, and pass the time of day with the lodgekeeper; but in that prouder period, when I had already passed my walking test, and was allowed to go out, as my Nurse said, “like a little lady.” Round came the motor, churning up the gravel, avoiding the beds as if by a miracle; and there was our good old chauffeur, Masters, in his peaked cap and double-breasted great-coat, holding open the door for us. There followed, in early days, the starting of the car by a sort of winding apparatus in front (unless my memory deceives me): I always felt a certain sense of ceremonial deficiency about the “self-starter.” Then down the broad sweep of the drive, with the giant araucarias on either side, under the lichenous stone archway of the lodge, and all Somerset was before us. The apples tugged at their overloaded branches, the cows stood patiently regardant in the water-meadows, the forester’s axe clicked on the hill-side, the old church-towers beckoned and were swallowed up behind us, sun-bonneted old dames slipped, curtseying, into the hedgerows—what better fate could a fairy enchanter bring us, than to be always at the springtime of life, and always at the autumn of the year? I cannot remember much of the friends who called or came to visit us. My mother’s family was represented by an old, angular Miss Linthorpe, and a married sister, Lady Trecastle. Miss Linthorpe, an aunt of my mother’s, already belonged to an older generation. You could tell it from the big, tortoiseshell-rimmed lorgnettes she wore (these were a kind of spectacles held in the hand by a stem, more for the purpose of staring your _vis-à-vis_ down than for any assistance they gave to the eyesight). You could tell it from the way she dropped her final g’s, and said “What?” suddenly, without meaning to ask a question, at the end of the sentence. You could tell it, above all, from a curious dignity she had, a dignity which seemed to sit upon her as of right _because she was a woman_, that I have never known except in my earliest memories. She was very brusque with my mother, especially about my own education. On one occasion, I remember, I had torn a rather pretty fan of my mother’s, because she had refused to grant me some trifling request. My mother, instead of passing over the incident as a modern mother would, was endeavouring to make me say I was sorry. When Miss Linthorpe came into the room, and the situation was explained to her, she asked, as if it was the most natural thing in the world, “Why don’t you send the little hussy to bed?” My mother explained that, according to the latest educational theories, sending children to bed early when they were young was likely to lay up the seeds of insomnia for them in early life.