of itself; and he read without note or comment. I recall a
very distinct impression on my infant mind that the passages of the Old
Testament which were read at prayers had no meaning, and that the public
reading of the words, without reference to sense, was an act of piety.
After the chapter, my father read one of Henry Thornton's Family
Prayers, replaced in later years by those of Ashton Oxenden.

While we were still very young children, we were carefully incited to
acts of practical charity. We began by carrying dinners to the sick and
aged poor; then we went on to reading hymns and bits of Bible to the
blind and unlettered. As soon as we were old enough, we became teachers
in Sunday schools, and conducted classes and cottage-meetings. From the
very beginning we were taught to save up our money for good causes. Each
of us had a "missionary box," and I remember another box, in the
counterfeit presentment of a Gothic church, which received contributions
for the Church Pastoral Aid Society. When, on an occasion of rare
dissipation, I won some shillings at "The Race-Game," they were
impounded for the service of the C.M.S., and an aunt of mine, making her
sole excursion into melody, wrote for the benefit of her young friends:

"Would you like to be told the best use for a penny?
I can tell you a use which is better than any--
Not on toys or on fruit or on sweetmeats to spend it,
But over the seas to the heathen to send it."

I learned my religion from my mother, the sweetest, brightest, and most
persuasive of teachers, and what she taught I received as gospel.

"Oh that those lips had language! Life has past
With me but roughly since I heard thee last."

_Sit anima mea cum Sanctis._ May my lot be with those Evangelical saints
from whom I first learned that, in the supreme work of salvation, no
human being and no created thing can interpose between the soul and the
Creator. Happy is the man whose religious life has been built on the
impregnable rock of that belief.

So much for the foundation. The superstructure was rather accidental
than designed.

From my very earliest days I had a natural love of pomp and pageantry;
and, though I never saw them, I used to read of them with delight in
books of continental travel, and try to depict them in my sketch-books,
and even enact them with my toys. Then came Sir Walter Scott, who
inspired me, as he inspired so many greater men, with the