The silence and the earnestness seemed wonderful and beautiful. It was strange to watch him when he did not know it. It seemed to me, then, that he had been working so through the whole night, and that some great good which I could only dimly understand was to come of it. My lying quiet, however, did not last long, for I knew the loving merry welcome I should have when, climbing--as I hoped and believed quite unperceived--up the back of his arm-chair, I should throw myself down into his lap with a loud cry of joy, and then we should have a famous game, until either he persuaded me to go back to my blankets to await a rational hour for getting up, or sent me up-stairs to be dressed. These two things--the intent, absorbed purpose, and the power of putting it aside to give himself up completely, with simple delight, to whatever he loved, whether to a child or to the beauty of nature--are the two that seem to me specially characteristic of him in all that later part of his life which comes within my remembrance. [Illustration: Dr Southwood Smith and his grandchild Gertrude.] At this time we lived in Kentish Town, then field-surrounded, he going daily to his consulting-rooms in Finsbury Square, returning late and giving the early mornings and Sundays to public work. These hours were at that period (1840 to 1842) chiefly devoted to the question of the employment of children in coal-mines, the more deeply impressed on me because the report which he was then writing had illustrations showing the terrible condition of people working in mines. I remember long bright Sunday mornings when he was at work endeavouring to remedy these evils. He let me do what little I could, such as the cutting out of extracts to be fastened on to the MS. report with wafers--and very particular I was as to the colour of these wafers! Sometimes all I could do to help was to be quiet--not the least hard work! Yet I loved these still Sunday mornings, and would not willingly have been shut out from them any more than from the afternoon ride which came later, when, perched up in front of him on his own horse, in the little railed saddle he had devised for me, we rode along the lanes towards Highgate. I can see now the sunset light falling on the grass and tree-stems of the Kentish Town fields as we went along. Then came the day when the Act was brought into operation which was to regulate the employment of children in mines, and I tied blue ribbons on to his carriage horses and thought, with a child's hopefulness, that all the suffering was at once and completely over. "Then, now, they are all running over the green fields," I said. My grandfather let me think it, and did not damp my enthusiasm by letting me know that this happy state of things was not arrived at in one day!