which she did not write some of us a letter or send us a book. Then there was a brother Tom, a midshipman—a wonderful being to my inexperienced eyes—who once or twice came to our house seated in the family donkey-chaise, which seemed to me, somehow or other, not to be an ordinary donkey-chaise, but something of a far superior character. I have pleasant recollections of them all, and of the annuals in which they all wrote, and a good many of which fell to my share. Like her sister, Susanna married an officer in the army—a Major Moodie—and emigrated to Canada, where the Stricklands have now a high position, where she had sons and daughters born to her, and wrote more than one novel which found acceptance in the English market. The Stricklands gave me quite a literary turn. When I was a small boy it was really an everyday occurrence for me to write a book or edit a newspaper, and with about as much success as is generally achieved by bookmakers and newspaper editors, whose merit is overlooked by an unthinking public. Let me say in the Stricklands I found an indulgent audience. On one occasion I remember reciting some verses of my own composition, commencing, ‘I sing a song of ancient men, Of warriors great and bold, Of Hercules, a famous man, Who lived in times of old. He was a man of great renown, A lion large he slew, And to his memory games were kept, Which now I tell to you,’ which they got me to repeat in their drawing-room, and which, though I say it that should not, evinced for a boy a fair acquaintance with ‘Mangnall’s Questions’ and Pinnock’s abridgment of Goldsmith’s ‘History of Rome.’ Happily, at that time, Niebuhr was unknown, and sceptical criticism had not begun its deadly work. We had not to go far for truth then. It was quite unnecessary to seek it—at any rate, so it seemed to us—at the bottom of a well; there it was right underneath one’s nose—before one’s very eyes in the printed pages of the printed book.