[Agnes’s father, Matthew Cowper, 1836 -1895, was a sea captain, only occasionally at home]. 

[…] My next recollections include one of a bear-like creature coming into our home and monopolising my mother’s attentions […] Up to this time, when I was three years of age, I had rarely come into contact with grown men for, during my father’s absence, my mother led a very secluded life.

[…]

My father possessed a good voice, and would ‘pace the bridge’ in the back garden for a full hour singing the songs that were being made currently popular by many of the concert and variety artists of the time such as Charles Coburn, then a very young man, and ‘Great MacDowell,’ particular favourites of which the only consecutive words I now remember being:

‘Sitting on a balcony, smoking a cigar,

Talking to a pretty girl, heedless of her Pa’ 

and ‘Up in a balloon, boys, up in a balloon’.