As to the food at Oakley, it was certainly rough, and included dishes not often seen at home, but I liked it all the better. My mother was by no means democratic. In fact she had a slight weakness in favour of rank. Somehow or other she had managed to know some people who lived in a “park” about five or six miles from Bedford. It was called a “park”, but in reality it was a big garden, with a meadow beyond. However, and this was the great point, none of my mother’s town friends were callers at the Park. But, notwithstanding her little affectations, she was always glad to let us go to Oakley with Jane, not that she wanted to get rid of us, but because she loved her. Nothing but good did I get from my wholly unlearned nurse and Oakley. Never a coarse word, unbounded generosity, and an unreasoning spontaneity, which I do think one of the most blessed of virtues, suddenly making us glad when nothing is expected. A child knows, no one so well, whereabouts in the scale of goodness to place generosity. Nobody can estimate its true value so accurately. Keeping the Sabbath, no swearing, very right and proper, but generosity is first, although it is not in the Decalogue. There was not much in my nurse’s cottage with which to prove her liberality, but a quart of damsons for my mother was enough. Going home from Oakley one summer’s night I saw some magnificent apples in a window; I had a penny in my pocket, and I asked how many I could have for that sum. “Twenty.” How we got them home I do not know. The price I dare say has gone up since that evening. Talking about damsons and apples, I call to mind a friend in Potter Street, whose name I am sorry to say I have forgotten. He was a miller, tall, thin, slightly stooping, wore a pepper-and-salt suit of clothes, and might have been about sixty years old when I was ten or twelve. He lived in an ancient house, the first floor of which overhung the street; the rooms were low-pitched and dark. How Bedford folk managed to sleep in them, windows all shut, is incomprehensible. At the back of the house was a royal garden stretching down to the lane which led to the mill. My memory especially dwells on the currants, strawberries, and gooseberries. When we went to “uncle’s”, as we called him, we were turned out unattended into the middle of the fruit beds if the fruit was ripe, and we could gather and eat what we liked. I am proud to say that this Potter Street gentleman, a nobleman if ever there was one, although not really an uncle, was in some way related to my father.