keen and vivid that if I am to write at all about him--and my duty in
that respect is clear--it must be out of the fulness of my heart. My
earliest recollections of him begin when I was a child and he was a
bright, self-reliant lad in the home at Newcastle, the characteristics of
which are with artless realism described in the opening pages of this
book. It is the simple truth to say that we grew up in an atmosphere of
love and duty. Our father was a man of studious habit, passing rich in
the possession of a library of dry works on theology which his children
never read, and among which they searched in vain for the fairy books and
stories, or even the poetry, dear to the youthful heart. He was a
faithful, rather than a gifted preacher, and I have always thought that
his power--it was real and far-reaching--lay in his modest, unselfish
life, and in that unfailing sympathy which kept him on a perpetual round
of visits to the sick and sorrowful, year in, year out. He had a quiet
sense of humour, and was never so happy as when he could steal a day off
from the insistent claims of pastoral work for a ramble in the country
with his boys.

Always a public-spirited man, and keenly interested in political affairs,
he talked to us freely about the events of the time, and made us feel
that the little affairs of our own home and immediate environment could
never be seen in their true perspective until they were set against the
larger life of the town, and, in a sense, of the nation. When any great
event occurred he used to tell us all about it; when any great man died,
if we did not know the significance of his life and the loss it meant to
the country, it was not his fault. He was a quiet, rather reserved man,
terribly in earnest, we thought, and with a touch of sternness about him
which vanished in later life. He mellowed with the passing years, and
long before old age crept quietly upon him the prevailing note of his
character was charity. He had been in early life associated to some