else. Then she scolded us all in a lump together. "Dame
Hilda, what an untidy chamber!"--she usually began in that way--"why
don't you make these children put their playthings tidy? (Of course
Dame Hilda did, at the end of the day; but how could we have playthings
tidy while we were playing with them?) Meg, your hair is no better than
a mop! Jack, how got you that rent in your sleeve? (I never knew Jack
without a rent in some part of his clothes; I should not have thought it
was Jack if he had come in whole garments.) Joan, how ungainly you sit!
pluck yourself up this minute. Nym, take your elbows off the table.
Maud, your chaucers [slippers] are down at heel. How dirty your hands
are, Roger! go and wash them. Agnes, that wimple of yours is all awry;
who pinned it up?"

So she went on--rattle and scold, scold and rattle--as long as she
stayed in the room. Jack, always the saucy one, asked her one day, when
he was very little--

"Are you really Grandmother?"

"Certes, child," said she, turning to look at him: "why?"

"Because I wish you were somebody else!"

_Ha, chetife_! did Jack forget that afternoon? I trow not.

I had a sound whipping once myself from Dame Hilda, because I said,
right out, that I hated the Lady Margaret: and Joan,--poor delicate
Joan, who was perpetually scolded for stooping--looked at me as if she
wished she dared say it too. Roger had his ears boxed because he
drawled out, "Amen!" I think we all said Amen in our hearts.

Sometimes the Lady Margaret did not come upstairs, but sent for some of
us down to her. That was worse than ever. There were generally a
number of gentlemen there, who seemed to think that children were only
made to be teased: and some of them I disliked, and others I despised.
Only of one I was terribly afraid: and that was--mercy, Jesu!--mine own
father.

I should have found it difficult to say what it was in him that
frightened me. I used to call it fear then; but when I look back on the
feeling from my present state, I think it was rather a kind of
ungovernable antipathy. He did not scold us all round as Lady Margaret
did. The worst thing, I think, that I remember his saying to me was a
sharp--"Get out of the way, girl!" And I wished I only could get out of
his way, for ever and ever. Something made me feel as if I could not
bear to be in the same room with him. I used to shiver all over, if I
only heard his voice. Yet he never ill-used any of u