young reporter a breezy, new atmosphere into the family circle--he went
to Preston, on the principle of promotion by merit. Then Leeds claimed
him, and next he settled in London, in the short-lived happiness of his
early married life, returning to Yorkshire--this time as chief of the
paper he had served so well. During his career as editor of the _Leeds
Mercury_ I saw comparatively little of him. We were both busy, though
in different ways; but we kept up, then and always, a brisk
correspondence, and his letters, all of them brimful of public interest
and family affection, are before me now. The world is a different place
to me now, but "memory is a fountain of perpetual youth" and nothing can
rob me of its sweetness.

There is scarcely an incident recorded in these pages which he did not
tell me at the time in familiar talk. There is much, also, that he has
not set down here, all of it honourable to himself, which I could recount
about those early days in Newcastle, and to a certain extent also in
Leeds, where I was again and again his guest; but, as he has chosen to be
silent, it is not for me to speak. Oddly enough, I never in my life heard
him deliver a political speech, nor do I think he excelled in that
direction. But he was admirable as a lecturer on literary subjects, and I
have seen him again and again hold a large audience spellbound when his
subject was Charlotte or Emily Bronte, Mrs. Carlyle, the Inner Working of
an English Newspaper, the Character of General Gordon, or some other
theme which appealed to him. He spoke rapidly and clearly, and between
the years 1882 and 1886 gave his services without stint in this direction
to the people of Leeds, Bradford, and other of the Yorkshire towns. The
manuscripts of these lectures are before me as I write; they are all in
his own hand, and they must have taken from an hour to an hour and a half
in delivery. Yet one of the most important of them--it runs to between
sixty and seventy closely written manuscript pages, and bears no marks of