A brief sketch of my life : a fragment.

  • Henry Power
Date:
1912
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: A brief sketch of my life : a fragment. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    from the skins ot the Hudson’s Bay House, which were con- stantly bei ng beaten to free them from moths. The whole house had an indescribable air of neglect, dirt and forlornness. The master suffered from asthma, and had the most violent fits of coughing; Clara was everlastingly working at cross stitch. She had begun to do a carpet composed of squares a foot or 18 inches on the side. The centre was a bunch of flowers, which, different in each square, she had herself designed. These she executed in the several squares, but there was a prodigious blank between each group, which had somehow or other to be filled in, and I think she became a terror to her old friends, who consequently rarely called, by asking them as soon as they had seated themselves to £ do a bit of grounding.’ The carpet, begun about 1840, was or is in existence now, 1904, at Woking, but is nearly worn out and the colours are faded. It was never of any use. My master, Thomas Lowe Wheeler, took a house at Sundridge, and died there in 1847 or 1848, at fifty-nine. I was then passed over to Thomas Rivington Wheeler'10, who was then about twenty-six years of age. He was married to Maria Wheeler in 1844, and she had a child, Thomas Henry Wheeler, in 1845. Thomas Wheeler had been utterly spoilt by his parents. If one told him to do a thing the other opposed it, so the boy learnt to do as he liked. I always got 011 well with my new master, but he was most cantankerous and exasperating. His wife, Maria, the daughter of Dr. Charles Wheeler, and consequently his cousin, was a cold-blooded woman and got to hate him, and they afterwards separated and lived apart till he died, at the age of sixty-six, I think, at Broadstairs, and she at Wimbledon or Wandsworth, no, at Midhurst(?). It was most amusing to watch their efforts to annoy and circumvent each other. If she wanted to go to a place she would begin by raising all sorts of objections, which he would sometimes overrule, and sometimes unexpectedly
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