than myself makes me feel that while I can recollect I should fix the events and the ideals of my life by pen and ink.  Like Mrs. Oliphant, I was born (three years earlier) in the south of Scotland.  Like her I had an adrnirable mother but she lost hers at the age of 60, while I kept mine till she was nearly 97.  Like Mrs. Oliphant, I was captivated by the stand made by the Free Church as a protest against patronage, and like her I shook off the shackles of the narrow Calvinism of Presbyterianism, and emerged into more light and liberty.  But unlike Mrs. Oliphant, I have from my earliest youth taken an interest in politics, and although I have not written the tenth part of what she has done, I have within the last 20 years addressed many audiences in Australia and America, and have preached over 100 sermons.  My personal influence has been exercised through the voice more strongly than by the pen, and in the growth and development of South Australia, to which I came with my parents and brothers and sisters when I was just 14, and the province not three years old, there have been opportunities for usefulness which might not have offered if I had remained in Melrose, in Sir Walter Scott’s country.

CHAPTER III.

A BEGINNING AT SEVENTEEN

Perhaps my turn for economics was partly inherited from my mother, and emphasized by my father having been an unlucky speculator in foreign wheat, tempted thereto by the sliding scale, which varied from 33/ a quarter, when wheat was as cheap as it was in 1837, to 1/ a quarter, when it was 70/ in 1839.  It was supposed that my father had made his fortune when he took his wheat out of bond but losses and deterioration during seven years, and interest on borrowed money—­credit having been strained to the utmost—­brought ruin and insolvency, and he had to go to South Australia, followed by his wife and family soon after.  It seems strange that this disaster should be the culmination of the peace, after the long Napoleonic war.  When my father married in 1815 he showed he was making 600 pounds a year, with 2,000 pounds book debts, as a writer or attorney and as agent for a bank.  But the business fell off, the book debts could not be collected; the bank called up the advances; and for 24 years there was a struggle.  My mother would not have her dowry of 1,500 pounds and other money left by an aunt settled on herself—­neither her father nor herself approved of it—­the wife’s fortune should come and go with her husband’s.  My father first speculated in hops and lost heavily.  He took up unlucky people, whom other business men had drained.  I suppose he caught at straws.  He had the gentlest of manners—­“the politest man in Melrose,” the old shoemaker called him.  My paternal grandfather was Dr. William Spence, of Melrose.  His father was minister of the Established Church at Cockburn’s Path, Berwickshire.  His grandfather was a small landed proprietor, but