In "The Cock-house at Fellsgarth" (1891), and in "Dick, Tom, and Harry" (1892), Reed returned to school life for the materials of his plots, and in these fully maintained his reputation. In addition to these stories, most of which have appeared, or are about to appear, in volume form, he contributed many short stories and sketches to the Christmas and Summer numbers of the _Boy's Own_. These are also, I am glad to learn, being collected for publication in volume form. In "Kilgorman," the last of the series of boys' books from his gifted hand, as in "Sir Ludar," he displays a fine historic sense--a capacity of living back to other times and picturing the people of another generation. Much of the scene of "Kilgorman" and of "Sir Ludar" is laid in Ireland--in the north and north-western corners of it--of all the localities in the United Kingdom perhaps the dearest to Reed's heart. To him, in more senses than one, Ireland was a land of romance. The happiest associations of his life were there. There he wooed and won his wife, the daughter of Mr Greer, M.P. for the County of Londonderry; and he and she loved to return with ever new pleasure to inhale the pure air of Castle-rock or Ballycastle, or to enjoy the quiet of a lonely little resting-place in Donegal, on the banks of Lough Swilly, to recuperate after a year's hard work in London. It was something to see the sunshine on Reed's beautiful face when the time approached for his visit to the "Emerald Isle." When he was sore stricken in the last illness, he longed with a great longing to return, and did return, to Ireland, hoping and believing that what English air had failed to do might come to pass there. Three weeks before his death he writes to me from Ballycastle, County Antrim: "I wish you could see this place to-day bathed in sunlight, Rathlin Island in the offing, Fair Head with its stately profile straight across the bay, and beyond, in blue and grey, the lonely coast of Cantire, backed by Goatfell and the lovely hills of Argyle." He loved Ireland. But for himself and for his family there were in Ireland associations of sadness that made the place sacred to him. His young and beloved brother Kenneth, with a comrade and kinsman, W.J. Anderson, in 1879 started on a canoe trip in Ireland, intending to explore the whole course of the Shannon and the Blackwater, together with the connecting links of lake and sea. In a gale of wind on Lough Allen--known as the "wicked Lough"--the canoes were both upset, and the two young men were drowned.