forget the delight I derived from his pleasant stories and the white sugar-candy, of which he always kept a stock on hand. Good old man! he died full of years, and was the first of a long series of friends whose loss I have had to lament. My father was, truly, that character emphatically styled “an Irish gentleman,” in whom the suavity of the Frenchman was combined with much of the fire and brilliancy of his native land. Though of an ancient family, his fortune, derived from an estate in the sister kingdom, was very limited, the “dirty acres” having somehow or other, from generation to generation, become “small by degrees, and beautifully less.” He was of a tender frame, and of that delicate, sensitive, nervous temperament, which, though often the attendant on genius, which he unquestionably possessed, little fits those so constituted to buffet with the world, or long to endure its storms. He died in the prime of manhood, when I was very young, and left my mother to struggle with those difficulties which are always incident to a state of widowhood, with a numerous family and a limited income. The deficiency of fortune was, however, in her case, compensated by the energies of a masculine understanding, combined with an untiring devotion to the interest and welfare of her children. Trades and professions in England are almost as completely hereditary as among the castes of India. The great Franklin derived his “ponderous strength,” physical if not intellectual, from a line of Blacksmiths, and I, Frank Gernon, inherit certain atrabilious humours, maternally, from a long series of very respectable “Qui Hyes.”[3] Yes, my mothers family—father, grandfather, uncles, and cousins—had all served with exemplary fidelity that potent merchant-monarch affectionately termed in India the Honourable John (though degraded, I am sorry to say, into an “old woman” by his native subjects); they had all flourished for more than a century under the shade of the “rupee tree,” a plant of Hesperidean virtues, whose fructiferous powers, alas! have since their time sadly declined. These, my maternal progenitors, were men both of the sword and pen; some had filled high civil stations with credit, whilst others, under the banners of a Clive, a Lawrence, or a Munro, had led “Ind’s dusky chivalry” to war, and participated in many of those glorious, but now time-mellowed exploits, from which the splendid fabric of our Eastern dominions has arisen. This, and other circumstances on which I shall briefly touch, combined to point my destiny to the gorgeous East. My mother, for the reasons given, and the peculiar facilities which she consequently had for establishing us in that quarter, had from an early period looked fondly to India as the theatre for the future exertions of her sons. But long before the period of my departure arrived—indeed I may say almost from infancy—I had been inoculated by my mother, my great uncle, and sundry parchment-faced