During his six years' Dorset curacy my father was elected mayor of the
little borough of Corfe Castle; and it was in Dorset, on 1st February
1843, that he married my mother, Mary Jackson (1815-93), the youngest
daughter of the Rev. James Leonard Jackson, rector of Swanage, and of
Louisa Decima Hyde Wollaston. Her father, my grandfather, was a great
taker of snuff; and one blustery day he was walking upon the cliffs when
his hat blew off. He chased it and chased it over two or three fields
until at last he got it in the angle of two stone walls. "Aha! my
friend, I think I have you now," said my grandfather, and proceeded to
take a leisurely pinch of snuff, when a puff of wind came and blew the
hat far out to sea. There are many more Dorsetshire stories that recur
to my memory; but neither here is the interest of Suffolk. So to Suffolk
we will come back, like my father in 1845, in which year he succeeded his
father as rector of Monk Soham.

Monk Soham is a straggling parish of 1600 acres and 400 inhabitants. {20}
It lies remote to-day, as it lay remote in pre-Reformation times, when it
was a cell of St Edmundsbury, whither refractory monks were sent for
rustication. Hence its name (the "south village of the monks"); and
hence, too, the fish-ponds for Lenten fare, in the rectory gardens. Three
of them enclose the orchard, which is planted quincunx-wise, with yew
hedge and grass-walk all round it. The "Archdeacon's Walk" that grass-
walk should be named, for my father paced it morning after morning. The
pike and roach would plash among the reeds and water-lilies; and "Fish,
fish, do your duty," my father would say to them. Whereupon, he
maintained, the fish always put out their noses and answered, "If _you_
do your duty, _we_ do our duty,"--words fully as applicable to parson as
to sultan.

{"Fish, fish, do your duty.": p20.jpg}

The parish has no history, unless that a former rector, Thomas Rogerson,
was sequestrated as a royalist in 1642, and next year his wife and
children were turned out of doors by the Puritans. "After which," Walker
tells us, "Mr Rogerson lived with a Country-man in a very mean Cottage
upon a Heath, for some years, and in a very low and miserable Condition."
But if Monk Soham has no history, its church, St Peter's, is striking
even among Suffolk churches, for the size of the chancel, the great
traceried east window, and the font sculptured with the Seven Sacraments.
The churchyard is pr