THESE MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS

_SS. "Ludgate Hill,"
within sight of Cape Race_

_NOTE_

_This volume of papers, unconnected as they are, it will be better to
read through from the beginning, rather than dip into at random. A
certain thread of meaning binds them. Memories of childhood and youth,
portraits of those who have gone before us in the battle,--taken
together, they build up a face that "I have loved long since and lost
awhile," the face of what was once myself. This has come by accident; I
had no design at first to be autobiographical; I was but led away by the
charm of beloved memories and by regret for the irrevocable dead; and
when my own young face (which is a face of the dead also) began to
appear in the well as by a kind of magic, I was the first to be
surprised at the occurrence._

_My grandfather the pious child, my father the idle eager sentimental
youth, I have thus unconsciously exposed. Of their descendant, the
person of to-day, I wish to keep the secret; not because I love him
better, but because with him I am still in a business partnership, and
cannot divide interests._

_Of the papers which make up the volume, some have appeared already in
"The Cornhill," "Longman's," "Scribner," "The English Illustrated," "The
Magazine of Art," "The Contemporary Review"; three are here in print for
the first time; and two others have enjoyed only what may be regarded as
a private circulation._

_R. L. S._

MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS

I

THE FOREIGNER AT HOME

"This is no' my ain house;
I ken by the biggin' o't."

Two recent books,[1] one by Mr. Grant White on England, one on France by
the diabolically clever Mr. Hillebrand, may well have set people
thinking on the divisions of races and nations. Such thoughts should
arise with particular congruity and force to inhabitants of that United
Kingdom, peopled from so many different stocks, babbling so many
different dialects, and offering in its extent such singular contrasts,
from the busiest over-population to the unkindliest desert, from the
Black Country to the Moor of Rannoch. It is not only when we cross the
seas that we go abroad; there are foreign parts of England; and the race
that has conquered so wide an empire has not yet managed to assimilate
the islands whence she sprang. Ireland, Wales, and the Scottish
mountains still cling, in part, to their old Ga