204 THE STOBY OF MY LIFE [1848
tree, where we used to be kindly entertained by the primitive old Rector, Mr. Cooper, and his wife.
When I went, in 1877, to visit Alfred Tennyson the poet, he asked me to give him a subject for " A Domestic Village Tragedy." The story which I told him occurred at Hurstmonceaux this summer. Mrs. Coleman, who kept the " dame's school," at Flowers Green, had a niece, Caroline Crowhurst, a very pretty girl, the belle of the parish, and as amiable and good
WILMINGTON PRIORY.
as she was pretty, so that every one was friends with her. She became engaged, rather against the will of her family, to a commercial traveller from a distance. He wrote to her, and she wrote to him, maidenly letters, but full of deep affection. One day they had a little quarrel, and the man, the fiend, took the most intimate, the most caressing of these letters and nailed it up against the Brewery in the centre of Gardneratastrophe, and that she would always be miserable in such an event. Twenty-two years afterwards, when we were as closely united as it was possible for any mother and son to be, my darling mother reverted of her own accord to this terrible time : she could never die happy, she said, unless she knew that her after love had quite effaced the recollection of it.