Читать книгу Pioneer Work in Opening the Medical Profession to Women онлайн

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The impression made by this little incident on a childish mind was curiously shown on my revisiting Bristol, after an absence of nearly forty years. Wishing to see the scene of my early childhood, I called at the Wilson Street house, and its occupants kindly allowed me to enter my old home, the home which I remembered as so large, but which then looked so small. All was changed. The pleasant walled-in garden across the street, with its fine fruit trees, where we played for hours together with a neighbour’s children, was turned into a carpenter’s yard. The long garden behind the house, with its fine trees, and stable opening into a back street, was built over; but as I stood in the hall and looked up, I suddenly seemed to see a little childish face peeping wistfully over the banisters, and the whole scene of that dining-room paradise, from which the child was banished, rose vividly before me.

But a stranger incident still occurred as I stood there. The sound of a latch-key was heard in the hall-door, and a figure, that I at once recognised as my father’s, in a white flannel suit, seemed to enter and look smilingly at me. It was only a momentary mental vision, but it was wonderfully vivid; and I then remembered what I had utterly forgotten—forgotten certainly for forty years—that our father would sometimes remain late at his sugar-house, and come home in the white flannel suit worn in the heated rooms of the refinery, letting himself into the house with a rather peculiar latch-key.