There was no dole.  Some of his grandchildren were brought to the funeral and we remonstrated with them, but did not take much by doing so.  John Pontifex, who was a year older than I was, sneered at penny loaves, and intimated that if I wanted one it must be because my papa and mamma could not afford to buy me one, whereon I believe we did something like fighting, and I rather think John Pontifex got the worst of it, but it may have been the other way.  I remember my sister’s nurse, for I was just outgrowing nurses myself, reported the matter to higher quarters, and we were all of us put to some ignominy, but we had been thoroughly awakened from our dream, and it was long enough before we could hear the words “penny loaf” mentioned without our ears tingling with shame.  If there had been a dozen doles afterwards we should not have deigned to touch one of them.

George Pontifex put up a monument to his parents, a plain slab in Paleham church, inscribed with the following epitaph:—­

SACRED TO THE MEMORY

OF

JOHN PONTIFEX

Who was born August 16th,

1727, And died February 8, 1812,

In his 85th year,

AND OF

Ruth pontifex, his wife,

Who was born October 13, 1727, and died January 10, 1811,

In her 84th year.

THEY WERE UNOSTENTATIOUS BUT EXEMPLARY

IN THE DISCHARGE OF THEIR

Religious, moral, and social duties.

THIS MONUMENT WAS PLACED

By their only son.

CHAPTER IV

In a year or two more came Waterloo and the European peace.  Then Mr George Pontifex went abroad more than once.  I remember seeing at Battersby in after years the diary which he kept on the first of these occasions.  It is a characteristic document.  I felt as I read it that the author before starting had made up his mind to admire only what he thought it would be creditable in him to admire, to look at nature and art only through the spectacles that had been handed down to him by generation after generation of prigs and impostors.  The first glimpse of Mont Blanc threw Mr Pontifex into a conventional ecstasy.  “My feelings I cannot express.  I gasped, yet hardly dared to breathe, as I viewed for the first time the monarch of the mountains.  I seemed to fancy the genius seated on his stupendous throne far above his aspiring brethren and in his solitary might