Father and Son by Edmund Gosse

I SLEPT in a little bed in a corner of the room, and my Father in the ancestral four-poster nearer to the door. Very early one bright September morning at the close of my eleventh year, my Father called me over to him. I climbed up, and was snugly wrapped in the coverlid; and then we held a momentous conversation. It began abruptly by his asking me whether I should like to have a new mamma. I was never a sentimentalist, and I therefore answered, cannily, that that would depend on who she was. He parried this, and announced that, anyway, a new mamma was coming; I was sure to like her. Still in a noncommittal mood, I asked: 'Will she go with me to the back of the lime-kiln? ' This question caused my Father a great bewilderment. I had to explain that the ambition of my life was to go up behind the lime-kiln on the top of the hill that hung over Barton, a spot which was forbidden ground, being locally held one of extreme danger. 'Oh!

I daresay she will,' my Father then said, 'but you must guess who she is. ' I guessed one or two of the less comely of the female 'saints', and, this embarrassing my Father, -- since the second I mentioned was a married woman who kept a sweet-shop in the village, -- he cut my inquiries short by saying, 'It is Miss Brightwen.'