age.  But somehow or other she failed to endow her offspring with her own robust constitution and powers of endurance.  “My father’s children were,” as Laurence Sterne grimly puts it, “not made to last long;” but one cannot help suspecting that it was the hardships of those early years which carried them off in their infancy with such painful regularity and despatch, and that it was to the same cause that their surviving brother owed the beginnings of that fatal malady by which his own life was cut short.

The diary of their travels—­for the early part of Sterne’s memoirs amounts to scarcely more—­is the more effective for its very brevity and abruptness.  Save for one interval of somewhat longer sojourn than usual at Dublin, the reader has throughout it all the feeling of the traveller who never finds time to unpack his portmanteau.  On the re-enrolment of the regiment in 1714, “our household,” says the narrative, “decamped from York with bag and baggage for Dublin.  Within a month my father left us, being ordered to Exeter; where, in a sad winter, my mother and her two children followed him, travelling from Liverpool, by land, to Plymouth.”  At Plymouth Mrs. Sterne gave birth to a son, christened Joram; and, “in twelve months time we were all sent back to Dublin.  My mother,” with her three children, “took ship at Bristol for Ireland, and had a narrow escape from being cast away by a leak springing up in the vessel.  At length, after many perils and struggles, we got to Dublin.”  Here intervenes the short breathing-space, of which mention has been made—­an interval employed by Roger Sterne in “spending a great deal of money” on a “large house,” which he hired and furnished; and then “in the year one thousand seven hundred and nineteen, all unhinged again.”  The regiment had been ordered off to the Isle of Wight, thence to embark for Spain, on “the Vigo Expedition,” and “we,” who accompanied it, “were driven into Milford Haven, but afterwards landed at Bristol, and thence by land to Plymouth again, and to the Isle of Wight;” losing on this expedition “poor Joram, a pretty boy, who died of the smallpox.”  In the Isle of Wight, Mrs. Sterne and her family remained till the Vigo Expedition returned home; and during her stay there “poor Joram’s loss was supplied by the birth of a girl, Anne,” a “pretty blossom,” but destined to fall “at the age of three years.”  On the return of the regiment to Wicklow, Roger Sterne again sent to collect his family around him.  “We embarked for Dublin, and had all been cast away by a most violent storm; but, through the intercession of my mother, the captain was prevailed upon to turn back into Wales, where we stayed a month, and at length got into Dublin, and travelled by land to Wicklow, where my father had, for some weeks, given us over for lost.”  Here a year passed, and another child, Devijeher—­so called after the colonel of the regiment—­was born.  “From thence we decamped to stay half a year with Mr. Fetherston, a clergyman, about