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accomplish the journey in their own carriage. This carriage accompanied us for many years when we travelled. It was fitted on the outside with a place for the heavy luggage, while inside there were huge pockets for provisions, and a net on the roof for books. It was placed on a truck where the railway was at hand, and hoisted on a steamer when we went down the Rhine or crossed the Channel. We children always preferred remaining in it on the water to being stuffed into a cabin. Stage-coaches there were none in Germany. The common her[d] had to avail themselves of the post or the diligence, in which they sat packed like herrings, unless they went with some carrier. The well-to-do travelled in their own carriages with postilions and postboys, and a courier who rode in front to order the horses at the next relay. I had but one experience of this mode of locomotion, when a very small child. My Mother and I were proceeding from Paris to London, but all I can recollect is it traversing the Bois de Boulogne - then a real wood and unconscious of its future glories - and halting at a relay where I indulged in some excellent cake while our team was being changed. A gay picture it was - the big, heavily laden coach, the steaming horses, the high-booted postilions with their glossy hats and long horns, and the jovial courier.

Some few years later I had an opportunity of seeing a travelling party in a carriage under far more memorable circumstances. The Queen and the Prince Consort, then Prince Albert, were expected in Frankfort. My Mother, who had remained English to the backbone and whose feelings of loyalty to her former sovereign never waned, sent my Brother and [me] I at dawn up the Mainzer Road, along which the august travellers had to proceed, and told us to give a good cheer as soon as they came in sight. At about eight a.m. our patience was rewarded; the equipage appeared, we waved our caps, shouted and hurrahed so frantically that the Queen and the Prince were roused from their sound slumbers, looked out of the carriage window and smiled at us more or less gratefully.

In the early years of my life I was entirely wrapped up in my home, and my thoughts hardly ever ventured beyond its narrow horizon. My Father was a high-minded and cultured man, devoted to his work, a keen sportsman, fond of literature and art, of good talk and whist; but he was not without some peculiarities, for though he was very kind-hearted, he took only a feeble interest in his children. For Mrs. Henderson, our nurse, I had little affection or regard, probably because she spoilt me too much and was always choking me with her kisses. I requited her by practising on her every conceivable ill-mannered joke. The one I repeated most effectively to my satisfaction was to pour an unnameable fluid into her tea, and then to scream with delight at the table at the faces she made while gulping it down.

Children, like dogs, feel instinctively who it is that genuinely loves them. All my love went to my Mother, who indeed sacrificed the whole of her short life (we lost her in 1859) to the care and tuition of her young family. I could hardly bear to be out of her sight; my happiest moments were when I was recovering from an illness and she nursed me and stayed at my bedside, telling me stories of which I never tired. My Mother was my guardian angel, and the one being around whom my existence revolved;