The Days of My Life: An AutobiographyOliphant, Mrs. (Margaret)
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The Days of My Life: An Autobiography
Oliphant, Mrs. (Margaret)
Oliphant, Mrs. (Margaret), 1828-1897
"I remember that I could once recollect my father, Hester," he said;
"but I think that is all. My mother I remember well enough; and I have
the most perfect recollection of the stone in memory of Brian Southcote,
to which she used to lead me; and the little grave close by, where I
have seen her prostrate herself in passionate sorrow, and where my
little brother, Harry Southern, lay. This little brother fills up a
great part of my earliest memory. He was a blight and shadow upon my
life, though I was full of vague, childish sympathy and admiration for
him. He had died just before my mother's second marriage, and when I was
born I was named after him, and my mother's greatest desire seemed to be
to make me a sort of shadow of her best-beloved child. I recollect quite
well her frequent exclamation: 'Your father calls you Edgar, but you are
Harry to me--always Harry to me--not my lost Harry, but, at least, his
name--oh! I cannot give up his name.' I suppose I was precocious, as
lonely children are so often; and I do not think I was quite satisfied
even then to be only the reflection of another. However, that time was
followed by a dismal one of friendlessness and solitude. And then a
sailor brother of the Savilles came by chance with his ship to Jamaica.
My poor mother had been in regular correspondence with her cousin, Miss
Saville, and the brother was commissioned to find me out. I came home to
England with him. All that my father had left in Jamaica had got into
very uncertain hands by that time; and, though the amount sounded well,
it was, I am afraid, only a fabulous inheritance; and I was a very poor
child, indeed, when our good Rector here, then a poor curate, took me in
and gave me shelter. I owed everything to their kindness, Hester. They
were humble people, and I had 'no claim upon them,' as people say; but
they were angels of charity to me.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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