often at
FitzGerald's. But there is another unrecorded story of an Irish
clergyman, the Rev. "Lucius O'Grady." He had quarrelled with one of his
churchwardens, whose name I forget; the other's was Waller. So my father
went over to arbitrate between the disputants, and Mr "O'Grady" concluded
an impassioned statement of his wrongs with "Voila tout, Mr Archdeacon,
voila tout." "Waller tew," quoth churchwarden No. 1; "what ha' _he_ to
dew with it?" And there was the visit to that woful church, damp,
rotten, ruinous. The inspection over, the rector said to my father,
"Now, Mr Archdeacon, that we've done the old church, you must come and
see my new stables." "Sir," said my father, "when your church is in
decent order, I shall be happy to see your new stables." And "the next
time," he told me, "I really could ask to see them."

Two London reminiscences, and I have done. A former Monk Soham
schoolmistress had married the usher of the Marlborough Street police
court. My father went to see them, and as he was coming away, an
officious Irishman opened the cab-door for him, with "Good luck to your
Rivirince, and did they let you off aizy?" And once my father was
waiting on one of the many platforms of Clapham Junction, when suddenly a
fashionably dressed lady dropped on her knees before him, exclaiming,
"Your blessing, holy Father." "God bless me!" cried my father,--then
added quietly, "and you too, my dear lady."

So at last I come to my father's own Suffolk stories. In 1877-78 I made
my first venture in letters as editor for the 'Ipswich Journal' of a
series of "Suffolk Notes and Queries." They ran through fifty-four
numbers, my own set of which is, I fancy, almost unique. I had a goodly
list of contributors--all friends of my father's--as Mr FitzGerald, Mr
Donne, Captain Brooke of Ufford, Mr Chappell, Mr Aldis Wright, Bishop
Ryle, and Professors Earle, Cowell, and Skeat. Of them I was duly proud;
still, my father and I wrote, between us, two-thirds of the whole. He
was the "Habitans in Alto" (_High_ Suffolk, forsooth), _alias_ "Rector,"
_alias_ "Philologus," "Hippicus," &c.--how we used to laugh at those
aliases. Among his contributions were three papers on the rare old
library of Helmingham Hall (Lord Tollemache's), four on Samuel Ward, the
Puritan preacher of Ipswich, three on Suffolk minstrelsy, and these
sketches written in the Suffolk dialect. Of that dialect my father was a
past-master; once and once o