CHAPTER XVI. NOVELS AND NOVELISTS. "The Lumley Entail"--"Gladys Fane"--My Experience in Novel-Writing--About Sad Endings--Imaginary Characters and Characters Drawn from Life--Visits from William Black and Bret Harte--Black as an After-Dinner Speaker--How Bret Harte saw Haworth Parsonage, and was Roughly Entreated by a Yorkshire Admirer--A Candid Opinion on the Brontë Monograph. CHAPTER XVII. TO THE DEFEAT OF THE GOVERNMENT (1885). More Antagonism towards Forster--A Household Suffrage Demonstration at Leeds--A Meeting at the Carlton Club and a Coincidence--Forster and "the most Powerful Man in England"--Single-Member Constituencies and the Cumulative Vote--Dynamite Outrages--Police Protection for Statesmen--I Receive Threatening Letters and Get a Fright--Death of Lord Houghton--Lord Derby and how he was Misunderstood--An Unconventional Dinner at Lord Houghton's--A Visit to Tangier--In Peril of the Sea--Gibraltar "a Magnificent Imposture"--Captain W. and the M.P.--To the North Cape--Cheering a Funeral Party--News of Mr. Gladstone's Overthrow--Home Again. MEMOIRS OF SIR WEMYSS REID. * * * * * CHAPTER I. EARLY DAYS. Birth and Parentage--Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the 'Forties--A Visit to St. Andrews--The Scottish Sabbath--First Acquaintance with a Printing Office--Tyneside in the Mid-Century--In Peril of Housebreakers--At Dr. Collingwood Bruce's School--A Plague of Flies--Cholera--Fire. It was in the old town, now the city of Newcastle-upon-Tyne that I first saw the light--March 29, 1842. My father, the Rev. Alexander Reid, was trained first at the University of St. Andrews, under Dr. Chalmers, and afterwards at Highbury College, London, under Dr. Pye-Smith, for the Congregational ministry. On leaving College he settled in 1830 at Newcastle, and there remained for half a century a faithful and honoured preacher, retiring in 1880 amid the esteem of the whole community on Tyneside. He died in 1887 under the roof of my younger brother Stuart, at Wilmslow, Cheshire, a year which was memorable to me in other than a sorrowful sense, since it was then that I settled in London. It was said of my father at the time of his death, in one of the Newcastle papers, that for a man to be in difficulty or sorrow was a passport to his help and sympathy. My mother was the daughter of Thomas Wemyss, of Darlington, a well known Biblical scholar and critic, a kinsman of the poet Campbell, and a direct descendant of the Stewarts of Ascog, Bute, a family which traced its descent in unbroken succession--with the bar sinister at the start--from Robert II. of Scotland.