a family chronicle. The brothers and sisters named in it are Walter, the
youngest of the family, a middy of fourteen, on board ship, and not very
happy in the Navy, which he was ultimately to leave for Durham
University and business; Willy, in the Indian Army, afterward the author
of _Oakfield_, a novel attacking the abuses of Anglo-Indian life, and
the first Director of Public Instruction in the Punjab--commemorated by
his poet brother in "A Southern Night"; Edward, at Oxford; Mary, the
second daughter, who at the age of twenty-two had been left a widow
after a year of married life; and Fan, the youngest daughter of the
flock, who now, in 1917, alone represents them in the gray house under
the fells. The little Westmorland farm described is still exactly as it
was; and has still a Richardson for master, though of a younger
generation. And Rydal Chapel, freed now from the pink cement which
clothed it in those days, and from the high pews familiar to the
children of Fox How, still sends the cheerful voice of its bells through
the valley on Sunday mornings.

The reader will remember, as he reads it, that he is in the troubled
year of 1848, with Chartism at home and revolution abroad. The "painful
interest" with which the writer has read Clough's "Bothie" refers, I
think, to the fact that she has recognized her second son, my father, as
to some extent the hero of the poem.

Fox How, _Nov. 19, 1848._

My Dearest Tom,--... I am always intending to send you something
like a regular journal, but twenty days of the month have now passed
away, and it is not done. Dear Matt, who was with us at the
beginning, and who I think bore a part in our last letters to you,
has returned to his post in London, and I am not without hope of