A tragedy, however, intervened to prevent this punishment. It appears that he was in a hurry to attend to some work in a field that day, and, while there, fell down dead. The neighbours announced that he had died through the ‘visitation of God,’ which was their usual way of explaining any sudden fatality of this kind. He was aged 84. His tomb at Whitchurch declares the event to have occurred in 1847. Soon after, I was transferred to the care of an ancient couple who lived at the other end of the Castle, named Richard and Jenny Price, keepers of the Bowling Green, into which one of the courts of the old Castle had been converted. The rate for my maintenance was fixed at half-a-crown a week, which my two uncles agreed to pay to the Prices. Old Richard Price, besides being a gamekeeper, was Sexton of Whitchurch, and Verger of St. David’s. His wife Jenny, a stout and buxom old lady, is remembered by me mostly for her associations with ‘peas-pudding,’ for which I had a special aversion, and for her resolute insistence that, whether I liked it or not, I should eat it. Other memories of this period are also unforgettable for the pains connected with them,--such as the soap-lather in my Saturday evening tub, and the nightly visits of Sarah Price, the daughter of the house, to her friends at Castle Row, where she would gossip to such a late hour that I always suffered from intolerable fidgets. Mothers of the present day will understand how hard it is for a child of four or five years old to remain awake long after sunset, and that it was cruel ignorance on the part of Sarah to keep me up until ten o’clock every night, to listen to her prosy stories of ghosts and graves. Sarah’s description of a devil, a curious creature with horns on his head, with hoofed feet and a long tail, was wont to make me shiver with fright. She was equally graphic and minute in her descriptions of witches, ghosts, fairies, giants and dwarfs, kidnappers and hobgoblins, bugaboos, and other terrific monsters, against whose extraordinary powers it behoved me to be always on guard. The dark night was especially haunted by them, and the ingle-nook by a bright fire was then the safest place for children.