ever grateful memory of her, though I never knew her, for her share in forming the tenderest, sweetest, proudest, purest, noblest woman I have ever known.  I have never met a woman more selflessly devoted to those she loved, more passionately contemptuous of all that was mean or base, more keenly sensitive on every question of honor, more iron in will, more sweet in tenderness, than the mother who made my girlhood sunny as dreamland, who guarded me until my marriage from every touch of pain that she could ward off, or could bear for me, who suffered more in every trouble that touched me in later life than I did myself, and who died in the little house I had taken for our new home in Norwood, worn out ere old age touched her, by sorrow, poverty and pain, in May, 1874.

Of my father my memory is less vivid, for he died when I was but five years old.  He was of mixed race, English on his father’s side, Irish on his mother’s, and was born in Galway, and educated in Ireland; he took his degree at Dublin University, and walked the hospitals as a medical student.  But after he had qualified as a medical man a good appointment was offered him by a relative in the City of London, and he never practised regularly as a doctor.

In the City his prospects were naturally promising; the elder branch of the Wood Family, to which he belonged, had for many generations been settled in Devonshire, farming their own land.  When the eldest son William, my father, came of age, he joined with his father to cut off the entail, and the old acres were sold.  Meanwhile members of other branches had entered commercial life, and had therein prospered exceedingly.  One of them had become Lord Mayor of London, had vigorously supported the unhappy Queen Caroline, had paid the debts of the Duke of Kent, in order that that reputable individual might return to England with his Duchess, so that the future heir to the throne might be born on English soil; he had been rewarded with a baronetcy as a cheap method of paying his services.  Another, my father’s first cousin once removed, a young barrister, had successfully pleaded a suit in which was concerned the huge fortune of a miserly relative, and had thus laid the foundations of a great success; he won for himself a vice-chancellorship and a knighthood, and then the Lord Chancellorship of England, with the barony of Hatherley.  A third, a brother of the last, Western Wood, was doing good service in the House of Commons.  A fourth, a cousin of the last two, had thrown himself with such spirit and energy into mining work, that he had accumulated a fortune.  In fact all the scattered branches had made their several ways in the world, save that elder one to which my father belonged.  That had vegetated on down in the country, and had grown poorer while the others grew richer.  My father’s brothers had somewhat of a fight for life.  One has prospered and is comfortable and well-to-do.  The other led for years a rough and wandering life, and “came to grief” generally.  Some years ago I heard of him as a store-keeper in Portsmouth dock-yard, occasionally boasting in feeble fashion that his cousin was Lord Chancellor of England, and not many months since I heard from him in South Africa, where he has secured some appointment in the Commissariat Department, not, I fear, of a very lucrative character.