this marriage.  At the time when the double misfortune above recorded befell him at the hands of Lucina and the War Office, his father had been some years dead; but Simon Sterne’s widow was still mistress of the property which she had brought with her at her marriage, and to Elvington, accordingly, “as soon,” writes Sterne, “as I was able to be carried,” the compulsorily retired ensign betook himself with his wife and his two children.  He was not, however, compelled to remain long dependent on his mother.  The ways of the military authorities were as inscrutable to the army of that day as they are in our day to our own.  Before a year had passed the regiment was ordered to be re-established, and “our household decamped with bag and baggage for Dublin.”  This was in the autumn of 1714, and from that time onward, for some eleven years, the movements and fortunes of the Sterne family, as detailed in the narrative of its most famous member, form a history in which the ludicrous struggles strangely with the pathetic.

A husband, condemned to be the Ulysses-like plaything of adverse gods at the War Office; an indefatigably prolific wife; a succession of weak and ailing children; misfortune in the seasons of journeying; misfortune in the moods of the weather by sea and land—­under all this combination of hostile chances and conditions was the struggle to be carried on.  The little household was perpetually “on the move”—­a little household which was always becoming and never remaining bigger—­continually increased by births, only to be again reduced by deaths—­until the contest between the deadly hardships of travel and the fatal fecundity of Mrs. Sterne was brought by events to a natural close.  Almost might the unfortunate lady have exclaimed, Quae regio in terris nostri non plena laboris? She passes from Ireland to England, and from England to Ireland, from inland garrison to sea-port town and back again, incessantly bearing and incessantly burying children—­until even her son in his narrative begins to speak of losing one infant at this place, and “leaving another behind” on that journey, almost as if they were so many overlooked or misdirected articles of luggage.  The tragic side of the history, however, overshadows the grotesque.  When we think how hard a business was travel even under the most favourable conditions in those days, and how serious even in our own times, when travel is easy, are the discomforts of the women and children of a regiment on the march—­we may well pity these unresting followers of the drum.  As to Mrs. Sterne herself, she seems to have been a woman of a pretty tough fibre, and she came moreover of a campaigning stock.  Her father was a “noted suttler” of the name of Nuttle, and her first husband—­for she was a widow when Roger Sterne married her—­had been a soldier also.  She had, therefore, served some years’ apprenticeship to the military life before these wanderings began; and she herself was destined to live to a good old