her's payments began and ended
with his noble advance of fifty shillings. The balance was never paid;
and it was rather hard lines that, on his becoming bankrupt in his poor
little way a few years later, a judge in the Bankruptcy Court remarked
that, as Miss Braddon was now making a good deal of money by her pen,
she ought to "come to the relief" of her first publisher.

[Illustration: MISS BRADDON'S FAVOURITE MARE.]

And now my volume of verses being well under weigh, I went with my
mother to farm-house lodgings in the neighbourhood of that very
Beverley, where I spent, perhaps, the happiest half-year of my
life--half a year of tranquil, studious days, far from the madding
crowd, with the mother whose society was always all sufficient for
me--half a year among level pastures, with unlimited books from the
library in Hull, an old farm-horse to ride about the green lanes, the
breath of summer, with all its sweet odours of flower and herb, around
and about us: half a year of unalloyed bliss, had it not been for one
dark shadow, the heroic figure of Garibaldi, the sailor soldier, looming
large upon the foreground of my literary labours, as the hero of a
lengthy narrative poem in the Spenserian metre.

My chief business at Beverley was to complete the volume of verse
commissioned by my Yorkshire Maecenas, at that time a very rich man, who
paid me a much better price for my literary work than his townsman, the
enterprising printer, and who had the first claim on my thought
and time.

[Illustration: THE ORANGERY.]

With the business-like punctuality of a salaried clerk, I went every
morning to my file of the _Times_, and pored and puzzled over Neapolitan
revolution and Sicilian campaign, and I can only say that if Emile Zola
has suffered as much over Sedan as I suffered in the freshness of my
youth, when flowery meadows and the old chestnut mare invited to summer
idlesse, over the fighting in Sicily, his dogged perseverance in
uncongenial labour should place him among the Immortal Forty. How I
hated the great Joseph G. and the Spenserian metre, with its exacting
demands upon the rhyming faculty. How I hated my own ignorance of modern
Italian history, and my own eyes for never having looked upon Italian
landscape, whereby historical allusion and local colour were both
wanting to that dry-as-dust record of heroic endeavour. I had only the
_Times_ correspondent; where he was picturesque I could be
picturesque--allowing alw