Nor had he been less adequate in dealing with the circumstances that had arisen, a few months later, in connection with the demises of Mrs. Emily Smith and the aunt that had stood with my mother’s mother at the foot of the stairs. Both these ladies, who had been living on Post Office annuities, had unhappily died after sharing a sausage, strongly suspected, though never actually proved, of harbouring the bacillus of botulism. Thanks to my father’s efforts, however, seconded by Mr. Balfour Whey, the firm by whom the sausage had been manufactured consented without prejudice to pay a sum of money sufficient to provide for the ladies’ interment. I have said sufficient, but after my father had reimbursed himself and paid the expenses of Mr. Whey, he was once more faced, as in the case of my grandparents, with an acute necessity for economy. Burying them in a double coffin, however, of his own design—a design for which he afterwards obtained the patent—he succeeded not only in keeping the undertaker’s bill within the balance at his disposal but in providing a surplus with which he afterwards obtained a small iron slab containing their names and ages. Nor was that all, for with the pound or two that was over he bought a third-class ticket to Aberdeen, where he had obtained a situation for Mrs. Emily Smith’s granddaughter as housemaid in a home for Xtian workers. After every such exhibition of pristine vigour, however, my father experienced an acute reaction, and for many weeks would become a martyr not only to neurasthenic indigestion, but to digestive neurasthenia accompanied by flatulence of the severest order. For months on end, indeed, my mother would be obliged to sit by his bedside in case he should wake up and require abdominal kneading, and few were the nights upon which she had not in addition to go downstairs and make him some cocoa. But he would never allow himself to be daunted. His breakfast the next morning would be as hearty as usual. And he was never deterred by even the most obstinate inflation from the performance of a moral or religious duty. Despite his courage, however, he was leaning on me with ever-increasing emphasis, and I am proud to recall that, in what was so soon to prove the heaviest ordeal of his life, I was able to render him very material and indeed essential assistance.