A welcome guest at country-house parties, he generally figured at them as a family connection, as a literary man and artist, and as an accomplished narrator of ghost stories. He indeed “called cousins” with so many people of note that the Crown Prince of Sweden, to whom he became bear-leader for a time, when asked what astonished him most in England, replied “the number of Mr. Hare’s cousins.” He was, in fact, the human exemplar of the fabled “hare with many friends.” XLVII The story of his life is a strange one. He tells how, as the third son, and most unwelcome addition to his parents’ growing family, he was, at the age of eighteen months, given away by his father and mother to a recently widowed and childless aunt, as eager to adopt, as his unnatural parents were keen to be rid of him. The aunt was Maria (Leycester) Hare, widow of his uncle Augustus; and thus, in the similarity of Christian names at least, there was a peculiar appropriateness in this adoption, which was undertaken in what seems a very cold-blooded way: the parents to have no claim upon their son and the aunt to be called “mother”; as indeed, throughout the story of his life, she is styled. She brought him up and sent him to Oxford, and for thirty years they lived together, as mother and son. He wrote a panegyric on her, in the “Memorials of a Quiet Life,” and in the long story of his own is seen to have been very much more affectionate than many real sons are. Yet the reader of his pages cannot help coming to the conclusion that the “sweet mother,” as he constantly styles her, was not only afflicted with a very dour religiosity, but was a tyrant in his infancy, and an exacting invalid, and an incredibly mean, parsimonious and suspicious creature during his youth and early manhood. But, for all that, no real mother ever had so good a son, so tender and constant a nurse in sickness, as he. [Illustration: “HUZ AND BUZ”: ENTRANCE TO HOLMHURST.] When, in 1860, it became necessary for his adopted mother to leave Lime and seek a new home, they long sought the ideal home of their fancy, which they named, in advance, “Holmhurst.” All through that summer they inspected innumerable small estates in the south of England, but none were in the least like that ideal “Holmhurst,” and they were on the point of abandoning the quest for awhile, and going abroad, when a neighbour sent a Hastings paper with the humble advertisement, “At Ore, a house with thirty-six acres of land, to be let or sold.”