he had to sell Spence’s mains, and the name was changed to Chirnside.  So (as my father used to say) he was sprung from the tail of the gentry; while my mother was descended from the head of the commonalty.  The Brodies had been tenant farmers in East Lothian for six or seven generations, though they originally came from the north.  My grandfather Brodie thought abrogation of the Corn Laws meant ruin for the farmers, who had taken 19 years’ leases at war prices.  But during the war times both landlords and farmers coined money, while the labourers had high prices for food and very little increase in their wages.  I recollect both grandfathers well, and through the accurate memory of my mother t can tell how middle-class people in lowland Scotland lived and dressed and travelled, entertained visitors. and worshipped God.  She told me of the “dear years” 1799 and 1800, and what a terrible thing a bad crop was, when the foreign ports were closed by Napoleon.  She told me that but for the shortlived Peace of Amiens she never heard of anything but war till the Battle of Waterloo settled it three months before her marriage.  From her own intimate relations with her grandmother, Margaret Fernie Brodie, who was born in 1736, and died in 1817, she knew how two generations before her people lived and thought.  So that I have a grasp on the past which many might envy, and yet the present and the future are even more to me, as they were to my mother.  On her death in 1887 I wrote a quatrain for her memorial, and which those who knew her considered appropriate—­

    Helen Brodie Spence
    Born at Whittingham, Scotland, 1791. 
    Died at College Town, Adelaide, South Australia, 1887.

    Half a long life ’mid Scotland’s heaths and pines,
    And half among our South Australian vines;
    Though loving reverence bound her to the past,
    Eager for truth and progress to the last.

Although my mother had the greatest love for Sir Walter Scott, and the highest appreciation of his poems and novels, she never liked Melrose.  She liked Australia better after a while.  Indeed, when we arrived in November, 1839, to a country so hot, so dry, so new, we felt like the good old founder of The Adelaide Register, Robert Thomas, when he came to the land described in his own paper as “flowing with milk and honey.”  Dropped anchor at Holdfast Bay.  “When I saw the place at which we were to land I felt inclined to go and cut my throat.”  When we sat down on a log in Light square, waiting till my father brought the key of the wooden house In Gilles street, in spite of the dignity of my 14 years just attained, I had a good cry.  There had been such a drought that they had a dearth, almost a famine.  People like ourselves with 80 acre land orders were frightened to attempt cultivation in an unknown climate, with seed wheat at 25/ a bushel or more, and stuck to the town.  We lived a month in Gilles street, then we bought a large marquee,