I look back to a happy childhood.  The many anxieties which reached both my parents were quite unknown to the children till the crisis in 1839.  I do not know that I appreciated the beauty of the village I lived in so much with my own bodily eyes as through the songs and the literature, which were current talk.  The old Abbey, with its ’prentice window, and its wonders in stonecarving, that Scott had written about and Washington Irving marvelled at—­“Here lies the race of the House of Yair” as a tombstone—­had a grand roll in it.  In the churchyard of the old Abbey my people on the Spence side lay buried.  In the square or market place there no longer stood the great tree described in The Monastery as standing just after Flodden Field, where the flowers of the forest had been cut down by the English; but in the centre stood the cross with steps up to it, and close to the cross was the well, to which twice a day the maids went to draw water for the house until I was nine years old, when we had pipes and taps laid on.  The cross was the place for any public speaking, and I recalled, when I was recovering from the measles, the maid in whose charge I was, wrapped me in a shawl and took me with her to hear a gentleman from Edinburgh speak in favour of reform to a crowd gathered round.  He said that the Tories had found a new name—­they called themselves Conservatives because it sounded better.  For his part he thought conserves were pickles, and he hoped all the Tories would soon find themselves in a pretty pickle.  There were such shouts of laughter that I saw this was a great joke.

We had gasworks in Melrose when I was 10 or 11, and a great joy to us children the wonderful light was.  I recollect the first lucifer matches, and the wonder of them.  My brother John had got 6d. from a visiting, uncle as a reward for buying him snuff to fill his cousin’s silver snuffbox, and he spent the money in buying a box of lucifers, with the piece of sandpaper doubled, through which each match was to be smartly drawn, and he took all of us and some of his friends to the orchard, we called the wilderness, at the back of my grandfather Spence’s house. and lighted each of the 50 matches, and we considered it a great exhibition.  ’My grandfather (old Dr. Spence) died before the era of lucifer matches.  He used to get up early and strike a fire with flint and steel to boil the kettle and make a cup of tea to give to his wife in bed.  He did it for his first wife (Janet Park), who was delicate, and he did the same for his second wife until her last fatal illness.  It was a wonderful thing for a man to do in those days.  He would not call the maid; he said young things wanted plenty of sleep.  He had been a navy doctor, and was very intelligent.  He trusted much to Nature and not too much to drugs.  On the Sunday of the great annular eclipse of the sun in 1835, which was my brother John’s eleventh birthday, he had a large double tooth extracted—­not by a dentist, and gas was then unknown or any other anaesthetic, so he did not enjoy the eclipse as other people did.  It took place in the afternoon, and there was no afternoon church.