ructure on your head gradually ascending to a foot high,
exclusive of feathers, and stretching to a penthouse of most horrible
projection behind, the breadth from wing to wing considerably broader
than your shoulder, and as many different things in your cap as in
Noah's ark. Verily, I never did see such monsters as the heads now in
vogue. I am a monster, too, but a moderate one.'

She must have been glad to get back to her home, to her daily work, to
Charles, climbing his trees and talking his nonsense.

In the winter of 1784 her mother died at Palgrave. It was Christmas
week; the old lady had come travelling four days through the snow in a
postchaise with her maid and her little grandchildren, while her son
rode on horseback. But the cold and the fatigue of the journey, and the
discomfort of the inns, proved too much for Mrs. Aikin, who reached her
daughter's house only to die. Just that time three years before Mrs.
Barbauld had lost her father, whom she dearly loved. There is a striking
letter from the widowed mother to her daughter recording the event. It
is almost Spartan in its calmness, but nevertheless deeply touching. Now
she, too, was at rest, and after Mrs. Aikin's death a cloud of sadness
and depression seems to have fallen upon the household. Mr. Barbauld was
ailing; he was suffering from a nervous irritability which occasionally
quite unfitted him for his work as a schoolmaster. Already his wife must
have had many things to bear, and very much to try her courage and
cheerfulness; and now her health was also failing. It was in 1775 that
they gave up the academy, which, on the whole, had greatly flourished.
It had been established eleven years; they were both of them in need of
rest and change. Nevertheless, it was not without reluctance that they
brought themselves to leave their home at Palgrave. A successor was
found only too quickly for Mrs. Barbauld's wishes; they handed over
their pupils to his care, and went abroad for a year's sunshine and
distraction.

V.

What a contrast to prim, starched scholastic life at Palgrave must have
been the smiling world, and the land flowing with oil and wine, in which
they found themselves basking! The vintage was so abundant that year
that the country people could not find vessels to contain it. 'The roads
covered with teams of casks, empty or full according as they were going
out or returning, and drawn by oxen whose strong necks seemed to be
bowed unwillingly u