icular, her uncle (my wife's father), Arthur William Devis, the
well-known historical painter, and her great-uncle, Anthony Devis, who
filled Albury House with his landscapes.

Some of our old German stock crossed the Atlantic in Puritan times, and
many of the name have attained wealth and position both in Canada and
the United States; notably Sir Charles Tupper northwards, and sundry
rich merchants in New York, Virginia, and the Carolines southwardly.

Of my infancy let me record that I "enjoyed" very delicate health,
chiefly due, as I now judge, to the constant cuppings and bleedings
whereby "the faculty" of those days combated teething fits, and (perhaps
with Malthusian proclivities) killed off young children. I remember,
too, that the broad meadows, since developed into Regent's Park and
Primrose Hill, then "truly rural," and even up to Chalk Farm, then
notorious for duels, were my nursery ramblings in search of cowslips and
new milk. Also, that once at least in those infantile days, my father
took me to see Winsor's Patent Gaslights at Carlton House, and how he
prognosticated the domestic failure of so perilous an explosive, more
than one blowing-up having carelessly occurred.

* * * * *

Another infantile recollection is memorable, as thus. My father's annual
holiday happened one year to be at Bognor, where a patron patient of
his, Lord Arran, rented a pleasant villa, and he had for a visitor at
the time no less a personage than George the Third: it must have been
during some lucid interval, perhaps after the Great Thanksgiving at St.
Paul's. My father took his little boy with him to call upon the Earl,
not thinking to see the King; but when we came in there was his
kind-hearted Majesty, who patted my curls and gave me his blessing! How
far the mysterious efficacy of the royal touch affected my after career
believers in the divine rights and spiritual powers of a king may
speculate as they please. At all events I got a good man's blessing.

I remember also in my nursery days to have heard this curious story of a
dream. My father, when a young man, was a student at Guy's Hospital,
from which school of medicine he went to Yarmouth to attend the wounded
after the battle of Copenhagen. He was on one occasion leaving Guernsey
for Southampton in the clumsy seagoing smack of those days, when, on the
night before embarking, he dreamt that on his way to the harbour he
crossed the churchya