This life of rapturous enjoyment has its acids, and at length comes to an end; and so did my walks, and my reflections, or contemplations, which passed through the mind while engaged in them. These, at the time, were mostly communicated to a moralising, sensible, and religious friend, who waited my return on the Sunday evenings, when, over our supper, he, in return, detailed to me the import of the sermons he had heard through the day.
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IN Christmas week, 1784, while I was amusing myself with sliding on the ice at Ovingham, which was as smooth almost as a looking glass, between Eltringham and that place,—I know not what came over my mind, but something ominous haunted it, of a gloomy change impending over the family. At this I was surprised, for I had never before felt any such sensation, and presently scouted it as some whim of the imagination. The day was to be one of cheerfulness; for Mr. and Mrs. Storey—distant relations of my father’s, and for whom my parents had the greatest regard—had been, with other friends, invited to dine with us at Cherryburn. At dinner all was kindness and cheerfulness, and my father was, as usual, full of his jokes, and telling some of his facetious stories and anecdotes. For two, or perhaps three Sundays after this, I was prevented from getting over the water, by the ice and other floods, and returned from Ovingham without seeing or hearing how all were at home. The Sunday after, upon my making my usual call at the gardener’s in Ovingham,—where, when at school, we always left our dinner poke, and dined,—he informed me, with looks of grief, that my mother was very unwell. I posted off, in haste, across the river, to see her. Upon my asking her, earnestly, how she was, she took me apart, and told me it was nearly all over with her; and she described to me how she had got her death. She had been called up, on a severe frosty night, to see a young woman in the hamlet below, who was taken ill; and, thinking the bog she had to pass through, might be frozen hard enough to bear her, she “slumped” deep into it, and, before she had waded through it, she got very wet and a “perishment” of cold; and, in that state, she went to give her advice as to what was best to be done with her patient. I employed my friend, Dr. Bailes, to visit her; and I ran up from Newcastle two or three times a week with his medicines for her; but all would not do: she died on the 20th February, 1785, aged 58 years. She was possessed of great innate powers of mind, which had been cultivated by a good education, as well as by her own endeavours. For these, and for her benevolent, humane, disposition, and good sense, she was greatly respected, and, indeed, revered by the whole neighbourhood. My eldest sister, who was down from London on a visit to her home, at the time of my mother’s illness and death, by her over-exertion and anxiety, brought on an illness; and, for the convenience of medical aid, and better nursing, I brought her to my hitherto little happy cot, at the Forth, where she died on the 24th June, 1785, aged 30 years. These were gloomy days to me! Some short time before my sister died, upon her requesting me, and my promising her, that I would see her buried at Ovingham, she proposed to sing me a song. I thought this very strange, and felt both sorrow and surprise at it; but she smiled at me, and began her song of “All Things have but a Time.” I had heard the old song before, and thought pretty well of it; but her’s was a later and a very much better version of it.