whirled
along the Glasgow and South-Western railway I witnessed just
beneath me lines of building in just such a valley, and said that
must be Sanquhar, which it was. My local memory has always been
good and very impressible by scenery. I seem to myself never to
have forgotten a scene.

I have one other early recollection to record. It must, I think,
have been in the year 1815 that my father and mother took me with
them on either one or two more journeys. The objective points were
Cambridge and London respectively. My father had built, under the
very niggard and discouraging laws which repressed rather than
encouraged the erection of new churches at that period, the church
of St. Thomas at Seaforth, and he wanted a clergyman for it.[4]
Guided in these matters very much by the deeply religious temper of
my mother, he went with her to Cambridge to obtain a recommendation
of a suitable person from Mr. Simeon, whom I saw at the time.[5] I
remember his appearance distinctly. He was a venerable man, and
although only a fellow of a college, was more ecclesiastically got
up than many a dean, or even here and there, perhaps, a bishop of
the present less costumed if more ritualistic period. Mr. Simeon, I
believe, recommended Mr. Jones, an excellent specimen of the
excellent evangelical school of those days. We went to Leicester to
hear him preach in a large church, and his text was '_Grow in
grace_.' He became eventually archdeacon of Liverpool, and died in
great honour a few years ago at much past 90. On the strength of
this visit to Cambridge I lately boasted there, even during the
lifetime of the aged Provost Okes, that I had been in the
university before any one of them.

I think it was at this time that in London we were domiciled in
Russell Square, in the house of a brother of my mother, Mr. Colin
Robertson; and I was vexed and put about by being forbidden to run
freely at my own will into and about the streets, as I had done in
Liverpool. But the main event was this: we went to a great service
of public thanksgiving at Saint Paul's, and sat in a small gallery
annexed to the choir, just over the place where was the Regent, and
looking down upon him from behind. I recollect nothing more of the
service, nor was I ever present at any public thanksgi