oeopathy, and who one day took five globules of aconite in
mistake for three? Frightened, she sent off for her homoeopathic
adviser--he was from home. So, for want of a better, she called in old
Dr Belman. He came, looked grave, shook his head, said if people would
meddle with dangerous drugs they must take the consequences. "But,
madam," he added, "I will die with you;" and, lifting the bottle of the
fatal globules, swallowed its whole contents. {17}

To the days of my father's first curacy belongs the story of the old
woman at Tannington, who fell ill one winter when the snow was on the
ground. She got worse and worse, and sent for Dr Mayhew, who questioned
her as to the cause of her illness. Something she said made him think
that the fault must lie with either her kettle or her tea-pot, as she
seemed, by her account, to get worse every time she drank any tea. So he
examined the kettle, turned it upside down, and then, in old Betty's own
words, "Out drop a big toad. He tarned the kittle up, and out ta fell
flop." Some days before she had "deeved" her kettle into the snow
instead of filling it at the pump, and had then got the toad in it, which
had thus been slowly simmering into toad-broth. At Tannington also they
came to my father to ask him to let them have the church Bible and the
church key. The key was to be spun round on the Bible, and if it had
pointed at a certain old woman who was suspected of being a witch, they
would have certainly ducked her.

A score of old faded letters, close-written and crossed, are lying before
me: my father wrote them in 1835 to his father, mother, and brother from
Brussels, Mainz, Leipzig, Dresden, Prague, Munich, &c. At Frankfurt he
dined with the Rothschilds, and sat next the baroness, "who in face and
figure was very like Mrs Cook, and who spoke little English, but that
little much to the purpose. For one dish I must eat because 'dis is
Germany,' and another because 'dis is England,' placing at the word a
large slice of roast-beef on my plate. The dinner began at half-past
two, and lasted three mortal hours, during the first of which I ate
because I was hungry, during the second out of politeness, and during the
third out of sheer desperation." Then there is a descent into a silver-
mine with the present Lord Wemyss (better known as Lord Elcho), a
gruesome execution of three murderers, and a good deal besides of some
interest,--but the interest is not of Suffolk.