younger than myself makes me feel that while I can recollect I should
fix the events and the ideals of my life by pen and ink. Like Mrs.
Oliphant, I was born (three years earlier) in the south of Scotland.
Like her I had an adrnirable mother but she lost hers at the age of 60,
while I kept mine till she was nearly 97. Like Mrs. Oliphant, I was
captivated by the stand made by the Free Church as a protest against
patronage, and like her I shook off the shackles of the narrow
Calvinism of Presbyterianism, and emerged into more light and liberty.
But unlike Mrs. Oliphant, I have from my earliest youth taken an
interest in politics, and although I have not written the tenth part of
what she has done, I have within the last 20 years addressed many
audiences in Australia and America, and have preached over 100 sermons.
My personal influence has been exercised through the voice more
strongly than by the pen, and in the growth and development of South
Australia, to which I came with my parents and brothers and sisters
when I was just 14, and the province not three years old, there have
been opportunities for usefulness which might not have offered if I had
remained in Melrose, in Sir Walter Scott's country.




CHAPTER III.



A BEGINNING AT SEVENTEEN


Perhaps my turn for economics was partly inherited from my mother, and