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THE RETROSPECT

by

ADA CAMBRIDGE

Author of
"Thirty Years in Australia," "Path and Goal," etc.







London
Stanley Paul & Co.
31 Essex Street, Strand, W.C.
Colonial Edition.




TO

MY FRIENDS, KNOWN AND UNKNOWN

WHO WERE YOUNG AND HAVE GROWN OLD WITH ME

I DEDICATE THIS BOOK




CONTENTS

        I. Coming Home
       II. About Town
      III. In Beautiful England
       IV. The Home of Childhood
        V. Halcyon Days
       VI. Earliest Recollections
      VII. Old Times and New
     VIII. Some Early Sundays
       IX. My Grandfather's Days
        X. Outdoor Life
       XI. At the Seaside
      XII. Excursions to Sandringham
     XIII. A Trip South
      XIV. "Devon, Glorious Devon!"
       XV. In the Garden of England




CHAPTER I

COMING HOME


There was a gap of thirty-eight years, almost to a day, between my
departure from England (1870), a five-weeks-old young bride, and my
return thither (1908), an old woman. And for about seven-eighths of that
long time in Australia, while succeeding very well in making the best of
things, I was never without a subconscious sense of exile, a chronic
nostalgia, that could hardly bear the sight of a homeward-bound ship.
This often-tantalised but ever-unappeased desire to be back in my native
land wore the air of a secret sorrow gently shadowing an otherwise happy
life, while in point of fact it was a considerable source of happiness
in itself, as I now perceive. For where would be the interest and
inspiration of life without something to want that you cannot get, but
that it is open to you to try for? I tried hard to bridge the distance
to my goal for over thirty years, working, planning, failing, starting
again, building a thousand air-castles, more or less, and seeing them
burst like soap-bubbles as soon as they began to materialise; then I
gave up. The children had grown too old to be taken; moreover, they had
attained to wills of their own and did not wish to go. One had fallen to
the scythe of the indiscriminate Reaper, and that immense loss dwindled
all other losses to nothing at all. I cared no more where I lived, so
long as the rest were with me. In England my father and mother, who had
so longed for me, as I for them, were in their graves; no old home was
left to go back to. I was myself a grandmother, in spite of kindly and
even vehement assurances that I did not look it; more than that, I
_could_ have been a great-grandmother without violating the laws of
nature. At any rate, I felt that I was past the age for enterprises. It
was too late now, I concluded, and so what was the use of fussing any
more? In short, I sat down to content myself with the inevitable.

I was doing it. I had been doing it for several years. The time had come
when I could look out of window any Tuesday morning, watch a
homeward-bound mail-boat put her nose to sea, and turn from the
spectacle without a pang. The business of building air-castles
flourished, as of yore, but their bases now rested on Australian soil.
What was left of the future was all planned out, satisfactorily, even
delightfully, and England was not in it.

Then was the time for the unexpected to happen, and it did. A totally
undreamed-of family legacy, with legal business attached to it, called
my husband home. Even then it did not strike me that I was called too;
for quite a considerable time it did not strike him either. But there
befell a period of burning summer heat, the intensity and duration of
which broke all past records of our State and established it as a
historic event for future Government meteorologists; the weaklings of
the community succumbed to it outright or emerged from it physically
prostrate, and I, who had encountered it in a "run-down" condition, was
of the latter company. The question: "Was I fit to be left?" obtruded
itself into the settled policy: it logically resolved itself into the
further question: "Was I fit to go?" There was nothing whatever to
prevent my going if I could "stand" it, and a long sea-voyage had been
do