widow when Roger Sterne married her--had been a soldier also. She
had, therefore, served some years' apprenticeship to the military life
before these wanderings began; and she herself was destined to live to
a good old age. But somehow or other she failed to endow her offspring
with her own robust constitution and powers of endurance. "My father's
children were," as Laurence Sterne grimly puts it, "not made to last
long;" but one cannot help suspecting that it was the hardships of
those early years which carried them off in their infancy with such
painful regularity and despatch, and that it was to the same cause
that their surviving brother owed the beginnings of that fatal malady
by which his own life was cut short.

The diary of their travels--for the early part of Sterne's memoirs
amounts to scarcely more--is the more effective for its very brevity
and abruptness. Save for one interval of somewhat longer sojourn than
usual at Dublin, the reader has throughout it all the feeling of
the traveller who never finds time to unpack his portmanteau. On
the re-enrolment of the regiment in 1714, "our household," says the
narrative, "decamped from York with bag and baggage for Dublin. Within
a month my father left us, being ordered to Exeter; where, in a sad
winter, my mother and her two children followed him, travelling from
Liverpool, by land, to Plymouth." At Plymouth Mrs. Sterne gave birth
to a son, christened Joram; and, "in twelve months time we were all
sent back to Dublin. My mother," with her three children, "took ship
at Bristol for Ireland, and had a narrow escape from being cast away
by a leak springing up in the vessel. At length, after many perils
and struggles, we got to Dublin." Here intervenes the short
breathing-space, of which mention has been made--an interval
employed by Roger Sterne in "spending a great deal of money" on a
"large house," which he hired and furnished; and then "in the year one