more involved, till at last the family became almost wholly dependent on my mother's small marriage settlement of less than a hundred a year, supplemented by his taking a few pupils and by a small salary which he received as librarian to a subscription library. While at Hoddesdon my sister Fanny got up a small boarding-school for young ladies in a roomy, old-fashioned house with a large garden, where my father passed the last few years of his life in comparative freedom worry about money matters, because these had reached such a pitch that nothing worse was to be expected.

from worry

During the latter part of the time we lived at Hertford his troubles were great. He appears to have allowed a

solicitor and friend whom he trusted to realize what remained of his property and invest it in ground-rents which would bring in a larger income, and at the same time be perfectly secure. For a few years the income from this property was duly paid him, then it was partially and afterwards wholly stopped. It appeared that the solicitor was himself engaged in a large building speculation in London, which was certain to be ultimately of great value, but which he had not capital enough to complete. He therefore had to raise money, and did so by using funds entrusted to him for other purposes, among them my father's small capital, in the absolute belief that it was quite as safe an investment as the ground-rents in which it was supposed to be invested. But, unfortunately, other creditors pressed upon him, and he was obliged to sacrifice the whole of the building estate at almost a nominal price. Out of the wreck of the solicitor's fortune my father obtained a small portion of the money due, with promises to pay all at some future time; and I recollect his having frequently to go to London by coach to interview the solicitor, and try to get some security for future payment. Among the property thus lost were some legacies from my mother's relations to her children, and the whole affair got into the hands of the lawyers, from whom small amounts were periodically received which helped to provide us with bare necessaries.

As a result of this series of misfortunes the children who

reached their majority had little or nothing to start with in earning their own living, except a very ordinary education, and a more or less efficient training. The oldest son, William, was first articled to a firm of surveyors at Kington, Herefordshire, probably during the time we resided at Usk. He then spent a year or two in the office of an architect at Hertford, and finally a year in London with a large builder named Martin then engaged in the erection of King's College, in order to become familiar with the practical details of building. He may be said, therefore, to have had a really good professional education. At first he got into general landsurveying work, which was at that time rather abundant, owing to the surveys and valuations required for carrying out the Commutation of Tithes Act of 1836, and also for the enclosures of commons which were then very frequent. During the time I was with him we were largely engaged in this kind of work in various parts of England and Wales, as will be seen later on; but the payment for such work was by no means liberal, and owing to the frequent periods of idleness between one job and another, it was about as much as my brother could do to earn our living and travelling

expenses.

About the time I went to live with my brother my sister Fanny entered a French school at Lille to learn the language and to teach English, and I think she was a year there. On her return she started the school at Hoddesdon, but after my father's death in 1843, she obtained a position as a teacher in Columbia College, Georgia, U.S.A., then just established under the Bishop of Georgia; and she only returned after my brother William's death in 1846, when the surviving members of the family in England were reunited, and lived together for two years in a cottage near Neath, in Glamorganshire.

My brother John, at the age of fourteen or fifteen, was apprenticed, first to Mr. Martin and then to Mr. Webster, a London builder living in Albany Street, Regent's Park, where he became a thorough joiner and carpenter. He afterwards worked for a time for Cubitt and other large builders; then, when he came to live with me at Neath, he learnt surveying

and a little architecture. When I went to the Amazon, he took a small dairy-farm at too high a rent, and not making this pay, in 1849 he emigrated to California at the height of the first rush for gold, joined several mining camps, and was moderately successful. About five years later he came home, married Miss Webster, and returning to California, settled for some years at Columbia, a small mining town in Tuolumne County. He afterwards removed to Stockton, where he practised as surveyor and water engineer till his death in 1895.

My younger brother, Herbert, was first placed with a trunk maker in Regent Street, but not liking this business, afterwards came to Neath and entered the pattern-shops of the Neath Ironworks. After his brother John went to California he came out to me at Para, and after a year spent on the Amazon as far as Barra on the Rio Negro, he returned to Para on his way home, where he caught yellow fever, and died in a few days at the early age of twenty-two. He was the only member of our family who had a considerable gift of poesy, and was probably more fitted for a literary career than for any mechanical or professional occupation.

It will thus be seen that we were all of us very much thrown on our own resources to make our way in life; and as we all, I think, inherited from my father a certain amount of constitutional inactivity or laziness, the necessity for work that our circumstances entailed was certainly beneficial in developing whatever powers were latent in us; and this is what I implied when I remarked that our father's loss of his property was perhaps a blessing in disguise.

Of the five daughters, the first-born died when five months old; the next, Eliza, died of consumption at Hertford, aged twenty-two. Two others, Mary Anne and Emma, died at Usk at the ages of eight and six respectively; while Frances married Mr. Thomas Sims, a photographer, and died in London, aged eighty-one.

On the whole, both the Wallaces and the Greenells seem to have been rather long-lived families when they reached manhood or womanhood. The five ancestral Wallaces of

whom I have records had an average age of seventy years, while the five Greenells had an average of seventy-six. Of our own family, my brother John reached seventy-seven, and my sister Fanny eighty-one. My brother William owed his death to a railway journey by night in winter, from London to South Wales in the miserable accommodation then afforded to third-class passengers, which, increased by a damp bed at Bristol, brought on severe congestion of the lungs, from which he never recovered.

I will now give a short account of my father's appearance and character. In a miniature of himself, painted just before his marriage, when he was thirty-five years old, he is represented in a blue coat with gilt buttons, a white waistcoat, a thick white neck-cloth coming up to the chin and showing no collar, and a frilled shirt-front. This was probably his wedding-coat, and his usual costume, indicating the transition from the richly coloured semi-court dress of the earlier Georgian period to the plain black of our own day. He is shown as having a ruddy complexion, blue eyes, and carefully dressed and curled hair, which I think must have been powdered, or else in the transition from light brown to pure white. As I remember him from the age of fifty-five onwards, his hair was rather thin and quite white, and he was always clean-shaved as in the miniature. He continued to wear the frilled shirt and thick white neckties, but never wore any outer clothing but black, of the cut we now term a dresssuit, but the coat double-breasted, and the whole rather loose fitting. He also wore large shoes and black cloth gaiters out-of-doors. This dress he never altered, having at first one new suit a year, but latterly I think only one every second or third year; but he always had one for Sundays and visiting, which was kept in perfect order. The second was for everyday wear; and when gardening or doing any other work likely to be injurious to his clothes, I think I remember him wearing a thin home-made holland jacket and a gardener's apron.

In figure he was somewhat below the middle height. He