k again
whether he thought there was any chance at all of my recovering them, or
of his recovering them for me. He smiled a sweet smile, and--shaking his
head, I regret to say, in a negative way--answered that he thought there
was not the slightest hope, as, from the description of the watch, chain,
etc., which I had given him, he had no doubt that they had by that time
passed through the melting pot, so that it was not even worth while to
offer a reward.

The house where I was born was at that time one of the largest in the
city. It is situated almost in the centre of Jerez, and occupies a very
large block of ground, for in addition to the house itself and gardens,
the wine-cellars, the cooperage, stables and other accessory buildings
attached to them, were all grouped round it. To-day a holy order of nuns
occupies it as a convent. No longer is heard the crackling of the fires
and the hammering of the iron hoops in the cooperage. No longer the teams
of upstanding mules, with the music of their brass bells, are seen
leaving the cellars with their load of the succulent wine. No longer is
the air filled with that odour which is so well known to those whose
lives are spent amidst the casks in which the wine is maturing. Instead,
peace and quiet reign. Sacrificing their time to the interests of
charity, the holy sisters dwell in peace.

Two recollections of some of my earliest days are somewhat vivid. I seem
to remember hearing the deep sound of a bell in the streets, looking out
of the window and seeing an open cart--full of dead bodies--stopping
before the door of a house, from which one more dead body was added to
the funeral pile. That was the year of the great cholera epidemic. And
again, I remember hearing bells early, very early, in the morning. We
knew what that was. It was the donkey-man coming round to sell the
donkeys' milk at the front door, quite warm and frothy.

My early school days in Spain were quite uneventful. After attending a
day-school at Jerez, kept by Don Jose Rincon, I went into the Jesuit
College at Puerto Real for a year. A new college was being built at
Puerto Santa Maria, to which the school was transferred, and it has been
added to since. It is now one of the best colleges in the south of
Spain.

On the death of my cousin, the entailed properties--as I have
said--became my father's, and the family left Spain to take up its
residence in Scotland.

CHAPTER II

MY SCHOOLING

The