" Not
many of them are standing now, and what there are, are all "dying atop."

{The Cottage, Boulge: p93.jpg}

It is a short walk from Bredfield Hall to Bredfield church and vicarage.
Both must be a good deal altered by restoration and enlargement since the
days (1834-57) of George Crabbe, the poet's son, about whom there is so
much in the Letters, and of whom I have often heard tell. He went up to
the great Exhibition of 1851; and, after his return, my father asked him
what he thought of it. "Thought of it, my dear sir! When I entered that
vast emporium of the world's commerce, I lifted up my arms and SHOUTED
for amazement." From Bredfield a charming walk through the fields
(trudged how many times by FitzGerald!) leads to the little one-storeyed
cottage in Boulge Park, where he lived from 1838 till 1853. It probably
is scarcely changed at all, with its low-pitched thatch roof forming
eyebrows over the brown-shuttered windows. "Cold and draughty," says the
woman who was living in it, and who showed me FitzGerald's old parlour
and bedroom. The very nails were still in the walls on which he hung his
big pictures. Boulge Hall, then tenantless, a large modern white-brick
house, brought me soon to Boulge church, half-hidden by trees. Fitzgerald
sleeps beneath its redbrick tower. His grave is marked by a flat granite
monument, carved with a cross-fleury. Pity, it seemed, that no roses
grew over it. {94}

Afterwards, for auld langsyne, I took a long pull down the Deben river;
and next morning I visited Farlingay Hall, the farmhouse where Carlyle
stayed with FitzGerald in 1855. It is not a farmhouse now, but a goodly
old-fashioned mansion, red-tiled, dormer-windowed, and all covered with
roses and creepers. A charming young lady showed me some of the rooms,
and pointed out a fine elm-tree in the meadow, beneath which Carlyle
smoked his pipe. Finally, if any one would know more of the country
round Woodbridge, let him turn up an article in the 'Magazine of Art' for
1885, by Professor Sidney Colvin, on "East Suffolk Memories, Inland and
Home."

{Farlingay Hall: p95.jpg}

But, besides this, I saw a good deal of Mr John Loder, third in a line of
Woodbridge booksellers, who knew FitzGerald for many years, and has much
to tell of him which were well worth preserving. From him I received a
loan of Mr Elihu Vedder's splendid illustrations to the 'Rubaiyat,' and a
couple of presents. The first is a pencil-drawing