Of the six children who grew up in the austerely simple but happy surroundings of my father's home, the eldest, Mary, was the daughter of my father by a previous marriage; she married the Rev. William Bathgate, D.D., of Kilmarnock, and died as recently as 1903, to my great sorrow. My elder brother James, with whom I was most closely associated in boyhood and youth, was always more or less of an invalid, and died at Leeds in 1880--the year in which our mother also passed away. I came next in the family, and my younger brothers are Alexander, now manager of the Dublin and Wexford Railway, and Stuart, who, like myself, has followed journalism and literature. It only remains for me to mention the youngest member of the family, John Paul, a bright and affectionate little fellow of thirteen, whose loss in 1868 threw a shadow over the home which only the passage of long years softened. Newcastle, in those days, was scarcely a third of its present size, and the river Tyne, which is now a mere ditch, hemmed in on either side by great manufactories, shipbuilding yards, and wharves, from its mouth to a point above Newcastle, was then a fair and noble river, which watered green meadows and swept past scenes of rural beauty. The house in which I was born stood in Elswick Row, and in the year of my birth--1842--that terrace of modest houses formed the boundary-line of the town on the west. Beyond it was nothing but fields and open country. There was no High Level Bridge in those days, spanning the river and forming a link in the great iron highway between the English and Scotch capitals; nor had so much as the first stone of the famous Elswick Ordnance and Engineering Works been laid. The future Lord Armstrong, whom I met at dinner not long ago, looking hardly older than when I first saw him, was then a solicitor, whose office stood in Westgate Street, and whose dreams could scarcely have foreshadowed his ultimate destiny. Richard Granger was just completing that great reconstruction of the centre of the town which gave Newcastle so noble and unprovincial an appearance; but the fine streets he had constructed--finer than any others to be found in England at that period--were still untenanted, and it was melancholy in walking along Clayton Street to see nine houses out of ten mere empty shells without doors or windows. My earliest recollections start out of the void with great distinctness on one particular day. It was my third birthday, and I can still recall vividly the two boys--myself and my brother James--who were playing together in the garden in front of the pleasant house we then occupied in Summerhill Terrace, when I was called into the drawing-room to receive my birthday gifts.