of his wrongs. But
with the poor mother's untimely death all this maternal supervision
came to an end. 'Amelia, your mother is gone; may you never have reason
to blush when you remember her!' her father said as he clasped his
little orphan to his heart; and all her life long Amelia remembered
those words.

There is a pretty reminiscence of her childhood from a beginning of the
memoir which was never written:--'One of my earliest recollections is of
gazing on the bright blue sky as I lay in my little bed before my hour
of rising came, listening with delighted attention to the ringing of a
peal of bells. I had heard that heaven was beyond those blue skies, and
I had been taught that _there_ was the home of the good, and I fancied
that those sweet bells were ringing in heaven.' The bells were ringing
for the Norwich Assizes, which played an important part in our little
heroine's life, and which must have been associated with many of her
early memories.

The little girl seems to have been allowed more liberty than is usually
given to children. 'As soon as I was old enough to enjoy a procession,'
she says, 'I was taken to see the Judges come in. Youthful pages in
pretty dresses ran by the side of the High Sheriff's carriage, in which
the Judges sat, while the coaches drove slowly and with a solemnity
becoming the high and awful office of those whom they contained.... With
reverence ever did I behold the Judges' wigs, the scarlet robes they
wore, and even the white wand of the Sheriff.'

There is a description which in after years might have made a pretty
picture for her husband's pencil of the little maiden wandering into the
court one day, and called by a kind old Judge to sit beside him upon the
bench. She goes on to recount how next day she was there again; and when
some attendant of the court wanted her to leave the place, saying not
unnaturally, 'Go, Miss, this is no place for you; be advised,' the Judge
again interfered, and ordered the enterprising little girl to be brought
to her old place upon the cushion by his side. The story gives one a
curious impression of a child's life and education. She seems to have
come and gone alone, capable, intelligent, unabashed, interested in all
the events and humours of the place.

Children have among other things a very vivid sense of citizenship
and public spirit, somewhat put out in later life by the rush of
personal feeling, but in childhood the personal events are so few