boy would seem to have taken the father's mercurial temperament, though not his physique: The regiment [he writes] was sent to defend Gibraltar, at the siege, where my father was run through the body by Capt. Phillips, in a duel (the quarrel began about a goose!): with much difficulty he survived, though with an impaired constitution, which was not able to withstand the hardships it was put to; for he was sent to Jamaica, where he soon fell by the country fever, which took away his senses first, and made a child of him; and then, in a month or two, walking about continually without complaining, till the moment he sat down in an armchair, and breathed his last, which was at Port Antonio, on the north of the island. My father was a little smart man, active to the last degree in all exercises, most patient of fatigue and disappointments, of which it pleased God to give him full measure. He was, in his temper, somewhat rapid and hasty, but of a kindly, sweet disposition, void of all design; and so innocent in his own intentions, that he suspected no one; so that you might have cheated him ten times in a day, if nine had not been sufficient for your purpose. Lieutenant Sterne died in 1731, and it would require but a few changes in the son's record to make it read like a page from _Henry Esmond_; the very texture of the language, the turn of the quizzical pathos, are Thackeray's. Laurence at this time was at school near Halifax, where he got into a characteristic scrape. The ceiling of the schoolroom had been newly whitewashed; the ladder was standing, and the boy mounted it and wrote in large letters, LAU. STERNE. The usher whipped him severely, but, says the _Memoir_, "my master was very much hurt at this, and said, before me, that never should that name be effaced, for I was a boy of genius, and he was sure I should come to preferment." From Halifax Sterne went to Jesus College, Cambridge, at the expense of a cousin. An uncle at York next took charge of him and got him the living of Sutton, and afterwards the Prebendary of York. Just how he came to quarrel with this patron we shall probably never know. Sterne himself declares that his uncle wished him to write political paragraphs for the Whigs, that he detested such "dirty work," and got his uncle's hatred in return for his independence. According to the writer of the _Yorkshire Anecdotes_, the two fell out over a woman--which sounds more like the truth. Meanwhile, Laurence had been successfully courting Miss Elizabeth Lumley at York, and, during her absence, had been writing those love-letters which his daughter published after the death of her parents, to the immense increase of sentimentalism throughout the United Kingdom. They are, in sooth, but a sickly, hothouse production, though honestly enough meant, no doubt. The writer, too, kept a copy of them, and thriftily made use