identified with the
kindly neighbours within a five-mile radius of my paternal Rectory. Five
miles was about the utmost our little pony could do. It was therefore
obviously impossible that I could be acquainted with any one beyond that
distance. And from first to last, from that day to this, no one leading
a secluded life has been so fatuous as to believe that my characters
were evolved out of my inner consciousness. "After all, you must own you
took them from _some one_," is a phrase which has long lost its novelty
for me. I remember even now my shocked astonishment when a furious
neighbour walked up to me and said, "We all recognised Mrs. Alwynn at
once as Mrs. ----, _and we all say it is not in the least like her_."

It was not, indeed. There was no shadow of resemblance. Did Mrs. ----,
who had been so kind to me from a child, ever hear that report, I
wonder? It gave me many a miserable hour, just when I was expanding in
the sunshine of my first favourable reviews.

When I was still quite a beginner, Mrs. Clifford published her beautiful
and touching book, "Aunt Anne."

There was, I am willing to believe--it is my duty to believe
_something_--a faint resemblance between her "Aunt Anne" and an old
great-aunt of mine, "Aunt Anna Maria," long since dead, whom I had only
seen once or twice when I was a small child.

The fact that I could not have known my departed relation did not
prevent two of my cousins, elderly maiden ladies who had had that
privilege, from writing to me in great indignation at my having ventured
to travesty my old aunt. They had found me out (I am always being found
out), and the vials of their wrath were poured out over me.

In my whilom ignorance, in my lamblike innocence of the darker side of
human nature, I actually thought that a disclaimer would settle the
matter.

When has a disclaimer ever been of any use? When has it ever achieved
anything except to add untruthfulness to my other crimes? Why have I
ever written one, after that first disastrous essay, in which I civilly
pointed out that not I, but Mrs. Clifford, the well-known writer, was
the author of "Aunt Anne?"

They replied at once to say that this was untrue, because I, and I
alone, _could_ have written it.

I showed my father the letter.

The two infuriated ladies were attached to my father, and had known him
for many years as a clergyman and a rural dean of unblemished character.
He wrote to them himself to assure them th