There has always been a vine on the west side of this house. My grandfather writes to my father, 7 November 1859, “Our grapes have turned out admirably this autumn, very large, equal to hothouse grapes in size and flavour. I only wonder that your mother has not been ill with them.” He writes on 1 July 1859, “Raspberries and strawberries in abundance, and I fear your aunt Ann has made too free with them, as she is ailing this morning.” My grandmother was 78 and her sister Ann was 80; but neither had learned wisdom yet. He writes on 4 January 1852, “I have been amused watching a nut-hatch. I see him go to the stock of the pear tree, take a nut from his little store and perch on another tree and knock away until he breaks it and eats the kernel. One nut appears to satisfy him at a time. Very provident it appears: a good lesson for man.” In two months time the lesson had been forgotten. He writes on 8 March 1852, “I see plainly that the malady was caused by my appetite being too good for my digestive powers.” Writing about a dinner in London at which my father had made a speech, he says on 26 May 1858, “Too much of the old Corporation gluttony, I am sorry to see.... I should like to attend, to hear good speeches, but a slice of good cold beef would content me, with a glass of real French brandy.” In fact, plain living and high thinking: but not without Cognac. He believed in brandy as a cure for everything, recommended it to everyone, and thought doctors ought to do the same. He writes, 24 January 1860, “I should say a little brandy would be beneficial, but doctors (you know) do not generally recommend what is easy to be got at by patients.” Of course, he could not recommend poor people to take brandy unless he gave them some to take. His advice was sought by many; and I have been told that when he died, there was quarts o’ tears a-shedded by the poor for he. When he had a cider-press built here in the autumn of 1842, he had another one (exactly like it) built by the same man at an outlying farm. After his death the press here was neglected, and it finally was taken down; but I have now brought over the other press from the farm, and put it in the place of the press that he put here. In 1919 I made some cider with it, to compare it with the modern press that I put up in 1901. It requires about ten per cent. more apples and considerably more labour to produce the same amount of cider. And the cider is not quite the same, as the apples have to be packed in with straw, and the straw affects the colour and the taste.