Years afterwards, when Mr. Gladstone had ceased all association with Harley Street, and was Prime Minister, I fell a victim to the desire to possess his autograph. Few people now realise how difficult a thing it was to secure, for the public imagined that the statesman showered post cards, then a somewhat new invention, on his correspondents by hundreds and thousands. I asked his friend Sir Thomas Bond what was best to do. His advice was shrewdness itself. Mr. Gladstone, he assured me, had great objections to giving his autograph. He could not himself ask him point-blank for his signature. “But if,” said he, “you will send one of your books as a presentation copy to him, with a little note on the title page, ‘To Mr. Gladstone, from the Author,’ I will take it across and ask him to write you an acknowledgment.” I did so, and Mr. Gladstone wrote me a charming little letter in his own hand: “10 DOWNING STREET, WHITEHALL. “To convey his best thanks for Mrs. Alec Tweedie’s kindness in sending him a book of so much interest. “W. E. GLADSTONE.” Not long before his death I had another letter from him, short, as all his communications were, but always long enough to include the gracefully drawn compliment which, one fears, has died out of the art of letter-writing as now practised: “DEAR MADAM, “I received your obliging gift and letter yesterday. I consider Finland a singularly interesting country, singularly little known; and I am reading your work in earnest and with great interest. “Your very faithful “W. E. GLADSTONE. “Jul. 13, ’97.” The mention of Mr. Gladstone in connection with Harley Street brings to mind his famous physician, Sir Andrew Clarke, who was a great personal friend of my father. At one time Sir Andrew Clarke had the largest practice in London, besides holding the proud position of President of the Royal College of Physicians. Thanks chiefly to a charming personality, he was one of the most successful and most beloved of all the London medical men, and to him is doubtless due the widespread discovery that a careful diet is a better means to health than promiscuous floods of medicine. These were some of the friendships and associations that surrounded my childhood: such was the soil that nourished my infant roots in kindliness and encouraged my green idea-buds to put forth into leaf. FOOTNOTES: [2] Lady Brilliana Harley was the daughter of Sir Edward Conway, and was born in the year 1600, at the Brill, of which her father was Governor. She became the third wife of Sir Robert Harley, of Brampton Bryan, in 1623. From her letters published by the Camden Society one gathers she was a woman of considerable education, and of deep religious feeling imbued with Calvinistic doctrine, while devotion to her home and children is the keynote of her correspondence.