y was tall and stiff of figure, with a singularly square
countenance, with a short whisker on each side of it; but spiritually he
was most affable and obliging; so was his wife; but as she was short and
globular, my father was wont to refer to her, in the privacy of domestic
intercourse, as Mrs. Roundey. They were profuse in invitations to go
with us to places--to Chester, to the Welsh show-places, and so forth;
and although I think my father and mother would rather have gone alone,
they felt constrained to accept these suggestions. It was in their
company, at all events, that I first saw Chester "Rows"; and also,
from some coign of vantage on those delightful old walls, an English
horse-race, with jockeys in silk caps and jackets tinted like the
rainbow. Mr. Squarey's demeanor towards my sisters and myself was
like that of the benevolent tutor in Sandford and Merton, with which
excellent work we were very conversant at that time; as, likewise, with
Edgeworth's Parents' Assistant, and with still another engaging volume
called, I think, the Budget of something; at any rate, it had two or
three little boys and girls in it, who were anxious to acquire useful
and curious information on many subjects, which was afforded them
in generous measure by their highly cultivated elders. Such
flower-garlanded instruction was the best specifically juvenile
literature which those primitive ages afforded. "Pray, mamma, why does
the sun rise in the east instead of in the west?" "Pray, papa, why was
King Alfred called 'The Good'?" Mrs. Markham's History of England was
constructed upon the same artless principle. What a distance we have
travelled since then!

But it was a good and happy life in Rock Park, and I think our father
and mother enjoyed it almost as much as we children did. They were
meeting people many of whom were delightful--I shall try to paint the
portraits of some of them in the next chapter--and they were seeing
towns and castles and places of historic and picturesque interest; and
my father was earning more money than ever before, though less than a
quarter as much as he would have earned had not Congress, soon after his
accession to office, cut down the emoluments. This was England; the
Old Home, and the Old World, for the understanding of which they had
prepared themselves all their lives previous. My father once said, "If
England were all the world, it would still have been worth while for the
Creator to have made it."