“Nothing but distressing reports came from our army, and we were almost immediately in the power of the French troops,[2] each house being crammed with men. In that in which we were obliged to bewail in silence our cruel fate, no less than 16 privates were quartered, besides some officers who occupied the best apartments, and this lasted for about two years [a note of later date says “not so long”] before the town was liberated.” A gap occurs here, between the years 1757 and 1760, several pages having been torn out in both the original “Recollections” and the unfinished memoir commenced in 1840. In the former, a sentence beginning “the next time I saw him [Jacob] was when he came running to my mother with a letter, the contents of which,” remains unfinished, and the narrative recommences with: “After reading over many pages, I thought it best to destroy them, and merely to write down what I remember to have passed in our family.” Accordingly there is no record of anything preserved during this interval until May, 1760, when the head of the family returned to it for good—broken in health and worn out by hardships to which he was no longer equal, but strong in purpose and devoting himself at once to the musical education of his children and to giving lessons to the numerous pupils who soon came to seek instruction from so excellent a master. Jacob returned for the second time from England at the end of 1759, and obtained the place of first violin in the court orchestra. As usual the appearance of this member of the family caused a general upset of domestic comfort, for “when he came to dine with us, it generally happened that before he departed his mother was as much out of humour with him as he was at the beefsteaks being hard, and because I did not know how to clean knives and forks with brickdust.” [Sidenote: 1760-1761. _Early Recollections._] The younger children made great progress under their father’s careful training, and with all her propensity for seeing the dark side, the daughter’s recollections of this period afford glimpses of a tolerably happy household. If it was “a helpless and distracted family” to which, as she writes, her father returned, those epithets could ill apply to the father himself, for there is abundant evidence that he was a man of no ordinary character—one who, in spite of constant suffering of a most distressing kind, persisted in hard work to the very end, and who set his children a noble example of patience, unselfishness, and self-denial. To the last, as his daughter records,—