yde. This has, upon the whole, been a
very good voyage, and Captain Wemyss, who enjoys it much, has been an
excellent companion; we met with pleasure, and shall part with
regret."

Strange that, after his long experience, my grandfather should have
learned so little of the attitude and even the dialect of the
spiritually-minded; that after forty-four years in a most religious
circle, he could drop without sense of incongruity from a period of
accepted phrases to "trust his wife was _getting up her spirits_," or
think to reassure her as to the character of Captain Wemyss by
mentioning that he had read prayers on the deck of his frigate
"_agreeably to the Articles of War"_! Yet there is no doubt--and it is
one of the most agreeable features of the kindly series--that he was
doing his best to please, and there is little doubt that he succeeded.
Almost all my grandfather's private letters have been destroyed. This
correspondence has not only been preserved entire, but stitched up in
the same covers with the works of the godly women, the Reverend John
Campbell, and the painful Mrs. Ogle. I did not think to mention the good
dame, but she comes in usefully as an example. Amongst the treasures of
the ladies of my family, her letters have been honoured with a volume to
themselves. I read about a half of them myself; then handed over the
task to one of stauncher resolution, with orders to communicate any fact
that should be found to illuminate these pages. Not one was found; it
was her only art to communicate by post second-rate sermons at
second-hand; and such, I take it, was the correspondence in which my
grandmother delighted. If I am right, that of Robert Stevenson, with his
quaint smack of the contemporary "Sandford and Merton," his interest in
the whole page of experience, his perpetual quest, and fine scent of all
that seems romantic to a boy, his needless pomp of language, his
excellent good sense, his unfeigned, unstained, unwearied human
kindliness, would seem to her, in a comparison, dry and trivial and
worldly. And if these letters were by an exception cherished and
preserved, it would be for one or both of two reasons--because they
dealt with and were bitter-sweet reminders of a time of sorrow; or
because she was pleased, perhaps touched, by the writer's guileless
efforts to seem spiritually-minded.

After this date there were two more births and two more deaths, so that
the number of the family remained u