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It does its duty to its men, who deserve well of the public as of the Great Eastern Railway itself; but its main merit, after all, is that it has been the making of East Anglia. Reydon Hall—The clergy—Pakefield—Social life in a village.
The Stricklands were a remarkable family, living about four or five miles from Wrentham, on the road leading from Wangford to Southwold, at an old-fashioned residence called Reydon Hall. They had, I fancy, seen better days, and were none the worse for that. The Stricklands came over with William the Conqueror. One of them was the first to land, and hence the name.
A few steps farther bring you to the low cliff, and there is the sea ever encroaching on the land in that quarter and swallowing up farmhouse and farm. Miss Agnes Strickland, who lived at Reydon Hall—a few miles inland—has thus sung the melancholy fate of Covehithe: ‘All roofless now the stately pile, And rent the arches tall, Through which with bright departing smile The western sunbeams fall.
In Suffolk such accomplished conversationalists were rare. It must have been, now I come to think of it, a dismal old house, suggestive of rats and dampness and mould, that Reydon Hall, with its scantily furnished rooms and its unused attics and its empty barns and stables, with a general air of decay all over the place, inside and out.
We have also a bureau, very complete, but evidently constructed more for use than ornament, which might have once contained the papers of this distinguished soldier, while the book-case, to which it was annexed, had probably held his little library. His cruet-stand, which looks as if it had been made in the patriarchal times, is still in use at Reydon Hall.
It was quite unnecessary to seek it—at any rate, so it seemed to us—at the bottom of a well; there it was right underneath one’s nose—before one’s very eyes in the printed pages of the printed book. Agnes Strickland did all she could to confer reputation on her native county. The tall, dark, self-possessed lady from Reydon Hall was a lion everywhere.
A good deal of blue blood flowed in their veins. Kate—to my eyes the fairest of the lot—was named Katherine Parr, to denote that she was a descendant of one of the wives of the too-much-married Henry VIII., and in the old-fashioned drawing-room of Reydon Hall I heard not a little—they all talked at once—of what to me was strange and rare. Mr.
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