the voluntary work already mentioned, and by which certain privileges could be purchased.[6] My grandfather inspired his sons and pupils with a longing to acquire knowledge, at the same time so completely winning their hearts by his good comradeship, that they readily joined him in the long and frequent walks of which he was fond, and in the course of which his walking stick was wont to serve to make rough drawings of problems, etc., in road or pathway. “His mathematical explanations,” wrote another old pupil in the “Essays of a Birmingham Manufacturer” (W. L. Sargent), “were very clear; and he looked at the bearings of every subject irrespective of its conventionalities. His definition of a straight line has been said to be the best in existence.”[7] [Illustration: By permission of Messrs. Thos. De La Rue. THOMAS WRIGHT HILL.] In my father's “Life,” Dr Birkbeck Hill, when writing of his recollections of our grandfather, said that it seemed “as if the aged man were always seated in perpetual sunshine. How much of the brightness and warmth must have come from his own cheerful temperament?... His Sunday morning breakfasts live in the memory like a landscape of Claude's.” At these entertainments the old man would sit in his easy-chair, at the head of the largest table the house could boast, in a circle of small, adoring grandchildren, the intervening, severe generation being absent; and of all the joyous crowd his perhaps was the youngest heart. There were other feasts, those of reason and the flow of soul, with which he also delighted his young descendants: stories of the long struggle in the revolted “American Colonies,” of the Great French Revolution, and of other interesting historical dramas which he could well remember, and equally well describe. His old pupils would come long distances to see him; and on one occasion several of them subscribed to present him with a large telescope, bearing on it a graven tribute of their affectionate regard. This greatly prized gift was in use till within a short time of his last illness.