St. Louis.  He was of Exeter College, Oxford, and for some years had been a professor in Codrington College, Barbadoes, in the West Indies, whence he had lately come.  To my natural surprise that he should be so far astray, he said he had been visiting a fellow Exeter man, a clergyman of the English Church, who was the rector of an Iowa parish.  It further developed that his young blind companion belonged to a family in the parish, and that Mr. Grey had good-heartedly assumed the care of him during an outing on the river.

A trip from St. Louis to St. Paul by river is longer now than a trip across the Atlantic.  I was nearly a week in my new companionship, and acquaintance grew and deepened fast.  The young blindman, whose manners were agreeable, became a general favourite, and Mr. Grey and I found we had much in common.  I mentioned to him that my errand in England the year before had been to find material for a life of Young Sir Henry Vane, the statesman and martyr of the English Commonwealth, and in his young days a governor of the province of Massachusetts Bay.  This touched in him a responsive chord.  He was familiar with the period and the character.  He was a friend of Shorthouse whose novel, John Inglesant was a widely-read book of those days.  He had helped Shorthouse in his researches for the book, and knew well the story of Charles I., and his friends and foes.  He was himself a staunch Churchman, but mentioned with some pleasure that his name appeared among the Non-conformists.  A sturdy noble of those days was Lord Grey of Groby, who opposed the King to the last, standing at the right hand of the redoubtable Colonel Pride at the famous “Pride’s Purge,” pointing out to him the Presbyterians whom the Ironside was to turn out of Parliament, in the thick of the crisis.  To my inquiry as to whether Lord Grey of Groby was an ancestor, he was reticent, merely saying that the name was the same.  I had begun to surmise that my new friend was allied with the Greys who in so many periods of English history have borne a famous part.  Some years before, while sojourning in a little town on the Ohio River, a stroll carried me to a coal-mine in the neighbourhood.  As I peered down two hundred feet into the dark shaft, a bluff, peremptory voice called to me to look out for my head.  I drew back in time to escape the cage as it descended with a group of miners from a higher plane to the lower deeps.  I thanked my bluff friend, who had saved my head from a bump.  A pleasant acquaintance followed which led to his taking me down into the mine, a thrilling experience.  He was an adventurous Englishman who had put money into a far-away enterprise, and come with his wife and children to take care of it.  His wife was a lady well-born, a sister of Sir George Grey, twice governor of New Zealand, and at the time High Commissioner and governor of Cape Colony, one of the most interesting of the great English nation-makers of the South Seas.  I came to know