Edith Cavell’s father was Rector of this parish for more than fifty years. He is dead now, but the villagers remember him well. His portrait shows him with a mouth and chin of unusual firmness. His eyes are kindly, but there is little sense of humour about them. It is notably the face of an upright man. Surely capable of sternness, he would be just to the point of inexorableness unless his face belies him. A sense of duty is implicit in every line; and we have the best of reasons for knowing that he transmitted this part of his character to his daughter Edith. “The clever Miss Cavell” she was called in later years when she worked at a London hospital; but a more dominant characteristic was a rigid insistence upon what she deemed to be right. This was the constant theme of the father’s sermons to his village flock. He would not hesitate to reproach from the pulpit any member of the congregation, whatever his station, whom he considered guilty of grave fault. The mother (who is now eighty years old, and lives very quietly at Norwich) brought a gentler influence to bear upon the Rectory life. There is a picture of her with two of her little girls. The mother wears the wide flounces which to-day are among the earliest memories of the “Men of Forty.” Flounces that were a protection and a promise. Something for little hands to cling to when the legs were not yet sure of their way. These flounces made a royal road from earth to the children’s heaven. The grown-up world far out of reach was always within call of a pull at the ample skirts. Mrs. Cavell was a happy mother, and her children were happy too. So early as the days we are speaking of her eyes had something wistful in them. It was almost as if some inner consciousness had told her then of the distant, poignant future. So the family grew up in a contented, well-ordered home, with plenty of outdoor games and sunshine, such as country children have. Long afterwards, in the midst of London slums, Edith Cavell would talk of the ripening blackberries far away in the Norfolk lanes, and of the great jam-making times which followed. CHAPTER III. WORK IN LONDON. Like Charlotte Brontë, another vicar’s daughter, Edith Cavell first learned something of the wider world in a Brussels school. It was commoner then than now--meaning by “now” before the war--for English girls to be sent to Belgium to school. Charlotte Brontë’s Brussels life has left us at least one imperishable book. Edith Cavell has left no written memorials of those times; but if we would reconstruct her life we may imagine some such background as that of “Villette”: the strangeness of a foreign city, fascinating by its novelty yet repelling by alien atmosphere.