astronomical instruments, was similarly loaded, as were also all the chairs but one in addition to that reserved for Mr Warburton's use. The floor was likewise piled with books, very narrow passages only being left to enable people to move about; and the whole place bore a look upon it as of “the repose of years.” When, after talking a while, Mr Warburton resumed his pen, my father had time, during his several visits, to read the whole of one of Macaulay's brilliant and then newly-published Essays in a volume which always occupied a particular spot on a table. [109] Many years after the establishment of the postal reform, on the occasion of a tour to the English Lakes, our parents took my younger sister and me to visit Miss Martineau at her prettily-situated Ambleside house. We two girls were charmed with her bright, sensible talk, and her kindly, winning personality. We found her also much better-looking than from her portraits we had expected to see her. _They_ missed the wonderful lighting up of the clever face which, when animated, looked far younger than when in repose. Among other interesting items of information, she told us of her, I fear, useless efforts to rescue the local rural population, then mostly illiterates, from the curse of intemperance. She contemplated giving a lecture on the subject, and showed us some horrifying coloured drawings representing the ravages effected by alcohol on the human system which she had prepared for it; but, as she knew that no one would come if the lecture were announced as about Drink, she said she should call it a “Discourse on Our Digestive Organs,” or something of the sort. We never heard the fate of that proposed lecture. [110] “The Story of Gladstone's Life,” p. 38. By Justin M'Carthy. [111] “Life,” i. 342. How well the great orator understood his poorer countrymen's need was shown when, for a few weeks before the 10th of January 1840, a tentative reduction to a uniform fourpenny rate outside London was introduced. The increase of letters during those few weeks stood at, for England and Wales, 33; Scotland, 51; and Ireland, 52 per cent. When my father and his brothers—as told in the Introductory Chapter—used to wander about the “green borderland” outside the smaller Birmingham and Wolverhampton of the early nineteenth century, they sometimes, in the summer and autumn seasons, fell in with the Irish haymakers and harvesters, and were struck with the frugal manner in which they lived, their sobriety and their unwillingness to break into the little hoard of money—their wages—which they aimed to take back intact to their families in Ireland at the end of their few months' service here. The postal reform enabled these men to write letters and to send their money home cheaply, frequently, and without waiting for the season's close.