Volume 1

George Harley, F.R.S. : the life of a London physician / edited by his daughter, Mrs. Alec Tweedie.

Date:
1899
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: George Harley, F.R.S. : the life of a London physician / edited by his daughter, Mrs. Alec Tweedie. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    myself again and again, and years afterwards I did, when on my wedding tour. ‘I know, moreover, how my taste for l’objet de vertu, for meubles Vartistiques, though only fully developed and culti- vated in later years, had its origin in my familiarity with the pretty ornaments my mother’s taste distributed throughout our sitting-rooms and bedchambers. Her home was full of charming little odds and ends, and no wonder these had accumulated, seeing that the Harleys lived in the locality for some centuries, and clung to the old place, never really leaving Haddington, indeed, until the last representative of the house, myself, forsook it in 1845, after all the other members of the family, with the ex- ception of one solitary sister, had died. ‘The worst episode in the breaking up of Harley House was that all the articles not wanted were sent to Elm House and put up in the garret—among them the old Toledo sword, a duck-gun, an Elizabethan clock, and the box of family manuscript papers. No more heed was paid to them till Elm House was some years afterwards let, and then it was discovered that everything had disappeared, supposed to have been taken by the men who cleared the chimney-stacks of the immense quantity of sticks the jack- daws had piled in the chimney. ‘ A curious coincidence occurred about this. On receiving a bill of £15 for clearing a chimney, I inquired into the matter, and found it had taken three men several days to take away the débris of the said dining-room chimney, for the jackdaws had dropped stick after stick down the aperture, so as to form a safe foundation on which they might build their nest, until the birds had literally filled it up with cart- loads of stuff. When it was all unearthed, a beautiful piece of old lace, once belonging to my mother, but mysteriously lost for many years, came to light. It hardly seemed . possible that birds could cause such fearful havoc, but those jackdaws pursued their work with unceasing energy for generations.
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