I found that my friend had just as much to do from morning to night as she could do, and I hoped with a great hope that “Uphill Work” would be published, and all the world would see how badly capable and industrious women were paid.  I fancied that a three-volume novel would be read, marked, and inwardly digested by everybody!  But Mrs. Graharn was appreciated by the matron, the doctors, and by the people of Dumfries, as she had not been in the village of Kirkbeen.  Her picturesque descriptions of life in the various colonies interested home-staying folk, for she had the keenest observing faculties.  There was an old cousin of Uncle Handyside’s who always turned the conversation on to Russia, where he had visited successful brothers; but his talk was not incisive.  My cousin Agnes asked me when I supposed this visit was paid, and I said a few years ago, probably, when she laughed and said—­“Nicol Handyside spent six weeks in Russia 30 years ago, and he has been talking about it ever since.”  One visit I paid in Edinburgh to an old lady from Melrose, who lived with a married daughter.  She had always been very deaf, and the daughter was out.  With great difficulty I got her to see by my card that my name was Spence.  “Are you Jessie Spence?” I shook my head.  “No; Katie.”  “Are you Mary Spence?” Another headshake, “No; I am Katie.”  “Then who are you?” She could understand the negative by the headshaking, but not anything else.  I wanted a piece of paper or a slate badly, but the daughter came in and made her mother understand that I was the middle Spence girl, and then the old lady said, “It is a very hot country you come from,” her only idea apparently of wonderful Australia.  And to think that in times long past some intriguing aunts tried very hard to arrange a marriage between my father and the deaf young lady who had about 600 pounds a year in land in and near Melrose.  She might have been my mother!  The idea was appalling!  None of her children inherited the deafness, and they took a fair proportion of good looks from their father, for the mother was exceedingly homely.  A brightlooking grandson was on the rug looking through a bound volume of Punch, as my nephew in Australia loved to do.  The two mothers were school companions and playmates.

My return to London introduced me to a wider range of society.  I had admissions to the Ladies’ Gallery of the House of Commons from Sir Charles Dilke, Professor Pearson’s friend, and I had invitations to stay for longer or shorter periods with people various in means, in tastes, and in interests.  To Mr. Hare I was especially drawn, and I should have liked to join him and his family in their yearly walking tour, which was to be through the Tyrol and Venice; but Aunt Mary protested for two good and sufficient reasons.  The first was that I could not walk 16 or 20 miles a day, even in the mountains, which Katie Hare said was so much easier than on the plains; and the second was that to take six weeks out of my