to his
friends and family) was born in a Government building on the coast of
Kent, near Dungeness, where his father was serving at the time in the
Coastguard, on March 25, 1833, and named after Admiral Fleeming, one of
his father's protectors in the navy.

His childhood was vagrant like his life. Once he was left in the care of
his grandmother Jackson, while Mrs. Jenkin sailed in her husband's ship
and stayed a year at the Havannah. The tragic woman was besides from
time to time a member of the family; she was in distress of mind and
reduced in fortune by the misconduct of her sons; her destitution and
solitude made it a recurring duty to receive her, her violence
continually enforced fresh separations. In her passion of a disappointed
mother, she was a fit object of pity; but her grandson, who heard her
load his own mother with cruel insults and reproaches, conceived for her
an indignant and impatient hatred, for which he blamed himself in later
life. It is strange from this point of view to see his childish letters
to Mrs. Jackson; and to think that a man, distinguished above all by
stubborn truthfulness, should have been brought up to such
dissimulation. But this is of course unavoidable in life; it did no harm
to Jenkin; and whether he got harm or benefit from a so early
acquaintance with violent and hateful scenes, is more than I can guess.
The experience, at least, was formative; and in judging his character it
should not be forgotten. But Mrs. Jackson was not the only stranger in
their gates; the Captain's sister, Aunt Anna Jenkin, lived with them
until her death; she had all the Jenkin beauty of countenance, though
she was unhappily deformed in body and of frail health; and she even
excelled her gentle and ineffectual family in all amiable qualities. So
that each of the two races from which Fleeming sprang, had an outpost by
his very cradle; the one he instinctively loved, the other hated; and
the lifelong war in his members had begun thus early by a victory for
what was best.

We can trace the family from one country place to another in the south
of Scotland; where the child learned his taste for sport by riding home
the pony from the moors. Before he was nine he could write such a
passage as this about a Hallowe'en observance: "I pulled a
middling-sized cabbage-runt with a pretty sum of gold about it. No
witches would run after me when I was sowing my hempseed this year; my
nuts blazed away together very co