and farmers coined money, while the labourers had high prices for food
and very little increase in their wages. I recollect both grandfathers
well, and through the accurate memory of my mother t can tell how
middle-class people in lowland Scotland lived and dressed and
travelled, entertained visitors. and worshipped God. She told me of the
"dear years" 1799 and 1800, and what a terrible thing a bad crop was,
when the foreign ports were closed by Napoleon. She told me that but
for the shortlived Peace of Amiens she never heard of anything but war
till the Battle of Waterloo settled it three months before her
marriage. From her own intimate relations with her grandmother,
Margaret Fernie Brodie, who was born in 1736, and died in 1817, she
knew how two generations before her people lived and thought. So that I
have a grasp on the past which many might envy, and yet the present and
the future are even more to me, as they were to my mother. On her death
in 1887 I wrote a quatrain for her memorial, and which those who knew
her considered appropriate--

HELEN BRODIE SPENCE
Born at Whittingham, Scotland, 1791.
Died at College Town, Adelaide, South Australia, 1887.

Half a long life 'mid Scotland's heaths and pines,
And half among our South Australian vines;
Though loving reverence bound her to the past,
Eager for truth and progress to the last.

Although my mother had the greatest love for Sir Walter Scott, and the
highest appreciation of his poems and novels, she never liked Melrose.
She liked Australia better after a while. Indeed, when we arrived in
November, 1839, to a country so hot, so dry, so new, we felt like the