love of Miss Pardoe's Turkish tales, and Byron's 'Bride of
Abydos,' which my mother, a devoted Byron worshipper, allowed me to read
aloud to her--and doubtless murder in the reading--a story of the Hartz
Mountains, with audacious flights in German diablerie; and lastly, very
seriously undertaken, and very perseveringly worked upon, a domestic
story, the outline of which was suggested by the same dear and
sympathetic mother.

[Illustration: LICHFIELD HOUSE, RICHMOND]

Now it is a curious fact, which may or may not be common to other
story-spinners, that I have never been able to take kindly to a plot--or
the suggestion of a plot--offered to me by anybody else. The moment a
friend tells me that he or she is desirous of imparting a series of
facts--strictly true--as if truth in fiction mattered one jot!--which
in his or her opinion would make the ground plan of an admirable,
startling, and altogether original three-volume novel, I know in advance
that my imagination will never grapple with those startling
circumstances--that my thoughts will begin to wander before my friend
has got half through the remarkable chain of events, and that if the
obliging purveyor of romantic incidents were to examine me at the end of
the story, I should be spun ignominiously. For the most part, such
subjects as have been proposed to me by friends have been hopelessly
unfit for the circulating library; or, where not immoral, have been
utterly dull; but it is, I believe, a fixed idea in the novel-reader's
mind that any combination of events out of the beaten way of life will
make an admirable subject for the novelist's art.

[Illustration: THE HALL]

My dear mother, taking into consideration my tender years, and perhaps
influenced in somewise by her own love of picking up odd bits of
Sheraton or Chippendale furniture in the storehouses of the less
ambitious second-hand dealers of those simpler days, offered me the
following _scenario_ for a domestic story. It was an incident which, I
doubt not, she had often read at the tail of a newspaper column, and
which certainly savours of the gigantic gooseberry, the sea-serpent, and
the agricultural labourer who unexpectedly inherits half a million. It
was eminently a Simple Story, and far more worthy of that title than
Mrs. Inchbald's long and involved romance.

An honest couple, in humble circumstances, possess among their small
household gear a good old easy chair, which has been the pride of a