Jersey, while my father kept the toll-gate, at which business the older
children helped him, but I was too small to be of service. I have no
memory of residence there, except the day of departure, and that only
emphasised by the fact that we left an old cat which had purred her way
into my affections, and separation from her was my first sorrow, so far
as I can remember.

In that home at Middlebrook, and in the few years after, I went through
the entire curriculum of infantile ailments. The first of these was
scarlet fever, which so nearly consummated its fell work on me that I
was given up by the doctors as doomed to die, and, according to custom
in those times in such a case, my grave clothes were completed, the
neighbours gathering for that purpose. During those early years I took
such a large share of epidemics that I have never been sick since with
anything worthy of being called illness. I never knew or heard of anyone
who has had such remarkable and unvarying health as I have had, and I
mention it with gratitude to God, in whose "hand our breath is, and all
our ways."

The "grippe," as it is called, touched me at Vienna when on my way from
the Holy Land, but I felt it only half a day, and never again since.

I often wonder what has become of our old cradle in which all of us
children were rocked! We were a large family, and that old cradle was
going a good many years. I remember just how it looked. It was
old-fashioned and had no tapestry. Its two sides and canopy were of
plain wood, but there was a great deal of sound sleeping in that cradle,
and many aches and pains were soothed in it. Most vividly I remember
that the rockers, which came out from under the cradle, were on the top
and side very smooth, so smooth that they actually glistened. But it