s wife, the daughter of Mr Greer, M.P. for the County of Londonderry;
and he and she loved to return with ever new pleasure to inhale the pure
air of Castle-rock or Ballycastle, or to enjoy the quiet of a lonely
little resting-place in Donegal, on the banks of Lough Swilly, to
recuperate after a year's hard work in London. It was something to see
the sunshine on Reed's beautiful face when the time approached for his
visit to the "Emerald Isle." When he was sore stricken in the last
illness, he longed with a great longing to return, and did return, to
Ireland, hoping and believing that what English air had failed to do
might come to pass there. Three weeks before his death he writes to me
from Ballycastle, County Antrim: "I wish you could see this place to-day
bathed in sunlight, Rathlin Island in the offing, Fair Head with its
stately profile straight across the bay, and beyond, in blue and grey,
the lonely coast of Cantire, backed by Goatfell and the lovely hills of
Argyle." He loved Ireland.

But for himself and for his family there were in Ireland associations of
sadness that made the place sacred to him. His young and beloved
brother Kenneth, with a comrade and kinsman, W.J. Anderson, in 1879
started on a canoe trip in Ireland, intending to explore the whole
course of the Shannon and the Blackwater, together with the connecting
links of lake and sea. In a gale of wind on Lough Allen--known as the
"wicked Lough"--the canoes were both upset, and the two young men were
drowned.

The shock in the family circle can be imagined. It was the beginning of
many sorrows. Two years later, in 1881, Sir Charles Reed died; and in
1883 the family was again plunged into grief by the sad death of
Talbot's eldest brother ("my 'father confessor' in all times of
trouble," Talbot used to say of him), the Reverend Charles Edward Reed,
who was accidentally killed by a fall over a precipice while he was on a
walking expedition in Switzerland. Lady Reed, it may be here said, died
in June 1891.

While most people will think that Talbot Reed's boys' books are his best
bequest to literature, he considered them of less importance in the work
of his life than his book entitled "A History of the Old English Letter
Foundries; with Notes Historical and Bibliographical on the Rise and
Progress of English Typography" (Elliot Stock, 1887), the preparation of
which cost him ten years of research and labour. His boys' books were
the spontan