A strange man altogether was that grandfather of mine, whom I can only remember as a grand-looking old man, with snow-white hair and piercing hawk’s eyes.  The merriest of wild Irishmen was he in his youth, and I have often wished that his biography had been written, if only as a picture of Dublin society at the time.  He had an exquisite voice, and one night he and some of his wild comrades went out singing through the streets as beggars.  Pennies, sixpences, shillings, and even half-crowns came showering down in recompense of street music of such unusual excellence; then the young scamps, ashamed of their gains, poured them all into the hat of a cripple they met, who must have thought that all the blessed saints were out that night in the Irish capital.  On another occasion he went to the wake of an old woman who had been bent nearly double by rheumatism, and had been duly “laid out”, and tied down firmly, so as to keep the body straight in the recumbent position.  He hid under the bed, and when the whisky was flowing freely, and the orgie was at its height, he cut the ropes with a sharp knife, and the old woman suddenly sat up in bed, frightening the revellers out of their wits, and, luckily for my grandfather, out of the room.  Many such tales would he tell, with quaint Irish humor, in his later days.  He died, from a third stroke of paralysis, in 1862.

The Morrises were a very “clannish” family, and my grandfather’s house was the London centre.  All the family gathered there on each Christmastide, and on Christmas day was always held high festival.  For long my brother and I were the only grandchildren within reach, and were naturally made much of.  The two sons were out in India, married, with young families.  The youngest daughter was much away from home, and a second was living in Constantinople, but three others lived with their father and mother.  Bessie, the eldest of the whole family, was a woman of rigid honor and conscientiousness, but poverty and the struggle to keep out of debt had soured her, and “Aunt Bessie” was an object of dread, not of love.  One story of her early life will best tell her character.  She was engaged to a young clergyman, and one day when Bessie was at church he preached a sermon taken without acknowledgment from some old divine.  The girl’s keen sense of honor was shocked at the deception, and she broke off her engagement, but remained unmarried for the rest of her life.  “Careful and troubled about many things” was poor Aunt Bessie, and I remember being rather shocked one day at hearing her express her sympathy with Martha, when her sister left her to serve alone, and at her saying:  “I doubt very much whether Jesus would have liked it if Martha had been lying about on the floor as well as Mary, and there had been no supper.  But there! it’s always those who do the work who are scolded, because they have not time to be as sweet and nice as those who do nothing.”  Nor could she ever approve of the treatment of the laborers in the