her husband Sam lived in one of the downstair rooms. At
one time of her life Phoebe kept a little dame's school on the Green. One
class of her children, who were reading the Miracles, were called "Little
Miracles"; and whenever my father went in, "Little Miracles" were called
up by that name to read to him. Old Phoebe had intelligence above the
common; she read her Bible much, and thought over it. She was fond, too,
of having my sister read hymns to her, and would often lift her hands in
admiration at any passage she particularly liked. She commended a cotton
dress my sister had on one day when she went to see her--a blue Oxford
shirting, trimmed with a darker shade. "It is a nice solemn dress," she
said, as she lifted a piece to examine it more closely; "there's nothing
flummocky about it."

Among the other Guildhall people were old Mrs "Ratty" Kemp, widow of the
Rat-catcher; {31} old one-eyed Mrs Bond, and her deaf son John; old Mrs
Wright, a great smoker; and Mrs Burrows, a soldier's widow, our only
Irishwoman, from whom Monk Soham conceived no favourable opinion of the
Sister Isle. Of people outside the Guildhall I will mention but one,
James Wilding, a splendid type of the Suffolk labourer. He was a big
strong man, whose strength served him one very ill turn. He was out one
day after a hare, and a farm-bailiff, meeting him, tried to take his gun;
James resisted, and snapped the man's arm. For this he got a year in
Ipswich jail, where, however, he learnt to read, and formed a strong
attachment for the chaplain, Mr Daniel. Afterwards, whenever any of us
were driving over to Ipswich, and James met us, he would always say, "If
yeou see Mr Daniel, dew yeou give him my love." Finally, an emigration
agent got hold of James, and induced him to emigrate, with his wife, his
large family, and his old one-legged mother, to somewhere near New
Orleans. "How are you going, Wilding?" asked my father a few days before
they started. "I don't fare to know rightly," was the answer; "but we're
goin' to sleep the fust night at Debenham" (a village four miles off),
"and that'll kinder break the jarney." They went, but the Southern
States and the negroes were not at all to their liking, and the last
thing heard of them was they had moved to Canada.

So James Wilding is gone, and the others are all of them dead; but some
stories still remain to be cleared off. There was the old farmer at the
tithe dinner, who, on having so