Towards the close of the eighteenth century and not long
before my father came to Paleham, he had taken a farm of about ninety
acres, thus making a considerable rise in life. Along with the farm
there went an old-fashioned but comfortable house with a charming garden
and an orchard. The carpenter's business was now carried on in one of
the outhouses that had once been part of some conventual buildings, the
remains of which could be seen in what was called the Abbey Close. The
house itself, embosomed in honeysuckles and creeping roses, was an
ornament to the whole village, nor were its internal arrangements less
exemplary than its outside was ornamental. Report said that Mrs Pontifex
starched the sheets for her best bed, and I can well believe it.
How well do I remember her parlour half filled with the organ which her
husband had built, and scented with a withered apple or two from the
_pyrus japonica_ that grew outside the house; the picture of the prize ox
over the chimney-piece, which Mr Pontifex himself had painted; the
transparency of the man coming to show light to a coach upon a snowy
night, also by Mr Pontifex; the little old man and little old woman who
told the weather; the china shepherd and shepherdess; the jars of
feathery flowering grasses with a peacock's feather or two among them to
set them off, and the china bowls full of dead rose leaves dried with bay
salt.
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