He was Member of Parliament successively for Newport in Cornwall, Beeralston and Romney, and commanded the Hampshire Militia. It was as a Militia-man that he made friends with Gibbon, who was a brother officer in the same regiment, and who persuaded him to undertake the history of Greece, so that the Hampshire Militia had the honour of producing two classical historians—the one of the “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” the other of Greece. Mitford’s history naturally took the Tory side in Greek politics: Grote and Thirlwall followed on the Radical side. One day Thomas Carlyle began talking to me about my great-grandfather; Carlyle was certainly no Tory, but he praised the so-called Tory book far above the other two. He said “that Mitford had the talent of clothing the dry bones of history with living flesh and blood: he made the old Greeks speak and behave like human beings, breathing a living spirit into his work.” The other two were so dreary and dull that they provoked no sympathy in him. Beyond all this the old Colonel, as he was called, was a very skilful forester and gardener. I possess an old, much-worn pruning knife with a horn handle which he always carried about when he was engaged in his favourite pursuit of landscape gardening. When a boy, he and his brother had been at school at Mr. Gilpin’s academy. Later in life he was able to present Gilpin to the living of Boldre in Hampshire. This led to the writing of the famous “Forest Scenery,” which Gilpin dedicated to his former pupil and subsequent patron. Gilpin’s brother was Sawrey Gilpin, R.A., the animal painter. It happened that in the spring of 1862 my father, having some business to transact with his agent and being unable to attend to it himself, sent me down to Exbury to act on his behalf. Mr. Lewis Ricardo, who was the tenant at the time, hearing that I was going there, very kindly offered me bed and board, saying that, though he was detained in London, his housekeeper would look after me. She made me very comfortable, and after a light dinner and a pint of claret I went to bed. In the dead of the night I was awakened—as it seemed to me—by a most uncanny noise in the room over my head. Someone was dragging a very heavy weight up and down the floor; then I heard the door open, and the footsteps came down the stairs pulling the weight, bump, bump, bump, until whoever it was reached my door. Then there was silence for a minute or two, and presently the weight was dragged up again, bumping as before, the door of the upstairs room was opened, the weight was dragged across it, and all was still.