CONTENTS. LIFE AT STEVENTON; FIRST VISIT TO BATH; IV. THE WRITING OF "PRIDE AND PREJUDICE," V. VISIT TO BATH; REMOVAL TO BATH; "THE VI. DEATH OF JANE'S FATHER; LODGINGS IN VIII. REMOVAL TO CHAWTON; PUBLICATION OF "SENSE AND SENSIBILITY," "PRIDE AND THE STORY OF JANE AUSTEN'S LIFE. I. PRELUDE. T is late afternoon in Winchester. The shadows are gathering in the gloomy transepts of the cathedral and lengthening across the quiet greensward of the Close. The great clock that overhangs the High Street strikes six; and a moment later the quarter chimes from the Guildhall send forth the slow music of their notes, and the hour is struck more slowly still. A pause, and then follow the four double quarter strokes, and the deliberate, dignified hour bell of the cathedral sounds far up in the tower, that is now a golden grey in the rays of the western sun. A longer pause succeeds, and then come the double quarter strokes from the belfry of the College of William of Wykeham, and the six meditative hour strokes afterward. Just in this same way may the hour have sounded in the ears of Jane Austen seventy-two years ago this 17th of July, 1889. It was the last hour the bells of the ancient city she had loved so much were ever to tell to her, the last which she was ever to heed, for a little later she had done with time. It was but a very small part of the world upon which she could look out that long-past July afternoon. In front was a narrow street along which the college boys were moving up and down at intervals like restless but irregular shuttles, disappearing and reappearing through the entrance to Commoners' just at hand; across the roadway a brick wall partly screening the narrow garden-plot of Dr. Gabell, the college head-master, behind which rose the high flint wall of the Close crowned with tufts of crimson flowers and waving streamers of dark ivy. Over this again were the grey tower and roof of the mighty cathedral, its south transept gable just seen above the green leafage of the Close. To the left the street view was bounded by the red brick houses of Kingsgate Street, into which it led; but to the right the eye might follow the roadway past the stone bridge over one of the streams of the Itchen, that bubbled out beneath the low arch in the wall of Wolvesey Castle, till it turned a sharp corner round the wall of the garden of the college warden. A bit of the Hampshire downs, a shoulder of St. Giles's Hill, closed the prospect here. This was all that she could have seen, and very little it may appear; but it was, nevertheless, a part of the scenery she had always known, and it was beneath the shadow of the majestic cathedral, |