saw the light--March 29, 1842. My father, the Rev. Alexander Reid, was
trained first at the University of St. Andrews, under Dr. Chalmers, and
afterwards at Highbury College, London, under Dr. Pye-Smith, for the
Congregational ministry. On leaving College he settled in 1830 at
Newcastle, and there remained for half a century a faithful and honoured
preacher, retiring in 1880 amid the esteem of the whole community on
Tyneside. He died in 1887 under the roof of my younger brother Stuart, at
Wilmslow, Cheshire, a year which was memorable to me in other than a
sorrowful sense, since it was then that I settled in London. It was said
of my father at the time of his death, in one of the Newcastle papers,
that for a man to be in difficulty or sorrow was a passport to his help
and sympathy. My mother was the daughter of Thomas Wemyss, of Darlington,
a well known Biblical scholar and critic, a kinsman of the poet Campbell,
and a direct descendant of the Stewarts of Ascog, Bute, a family which
traced its descent in unbroken succession--with the bar sinister at the
start--from Robert II. of Scotland.

Of the six children who grew up in the austerely simple but happy
surroundings of my father's home, the eldest, Mary, was the daughter of
my father by a previous marriage; she married the Rev. William Bathgate,
D.D., of Kilmarnock, and died as recently as 1903, to my great sorrow. My
elder brother James, with whom I was most closely associated in boyhood
and youth, was always more or less of an invalid, and died at Leeds in
1880--the year in which our mother also passed away. I came next in the
family, and my younger brothers are Alexander, now manager of the Dublin
and Wexford Railway, and Stuart, who, like myself, has followed
journalism and literature. It only remains for me to mention the youngest
member of the family, John Paul, a bright and affectionate little fellow
of thirteen, whose loss in 1868 threw a shadow over the home which only
the passage of long years softened.