een a tanner in the Suffolk town of Beccles, where
her mother still resided, and where Miss Elmy paid her occasional
visits. The long journey from Aldeburgh to Beccles was often taken by
Crabbe, and the changing features of the scenery traversed were
reproduced, his son tells us, many years afterwards in the beautiful
tale of _The Lover's Journey_. The tie between Crabbe and Miss Elmy was
further strengthened by a dangerous fever from which Crabbe suffered in
1778-79, while Miss Elmy was a guest under his parents' roof. This was
succeeded by an illness of Miss Elmy, when Crabbe was in constant
attendance at Parham Hall. His intimacy with the Tovells was moreover to
be strengthened by a sad event in that family, the death of their only
child, an engaging girl of fourteen. The social position of the Tovells,
and in greater degree their fortune, was superior to that of the
Crabbes, and the engagement of their niece to one whose prospects were
so little brilliant had never been quite to their taste. But henceforth
this feeling was to disappear. This crowning sorrow in the family
wrought more cordial feelings. Crabbe was one of those who had known and
been kind to their child, and such were now,

"Peculiar people--death had made them dear."

And henceforth the engagement between the lovers was frankly accepted.
But though the course of this true love was to run more and more
smooth, the question of Crabbe's future means of living seemed as
hopeless of solution as ever.

And yet the enforced idleness of these following years was far from
unprofitable. The less time occupied in the routine work of his
profession, the more leisure he had for his favourite study of natural
history, and especially of botany. This latter study had been taken up
during his stay at Woodbridge, the neighbourhood of which had a Flora
differing from that of the bleak coast country of Aldeburgh, and it was
now pursued with the same zeal at home. Herbs then played a larger part
than to-day among curative agents of the village doctor, and the fact
that Crabbe sought and obtained them so readily was even pleaded by his
poorer patients as reason why his fees need not be calculated on any
large scale. But this absorbing pursuit did far more than serve to
furnish Crabbe's outfit as a healer. It was undoubtedly to the observing
eye and retentive memory thus practised in the cottage gardens, and in
the lanes, and meadows, and marshes of Suffolk that his des