which my Father and I looked out on the map,
were eagerly discussed. One of my vividest early memories can be
dated exactly. I was playing about the house, and suddenly burst
into the breakfast-room, where, close to the door, sat an amazing
figure, a very tall young man, as stiff as my doll, in a gorgeous
scarlet tunic. Quite far away from him, at her writing-table, my
Mother sat with her Bible open before her, and was urging the
gospel plan of salvation on his acceptance. She promptly told me
to run away and play, but I had seen a great sight. This
guardsman was in the act of leaving for the Crimea, and his
adventures,--he was converted in consequence of my Mother's
instruction,--were afterwards told by her in a tract, called 'The
Guardsman of the Alma', of which I believe that more than half a
million copies were circulated. He was killed in that battle, and
this added an extraordinary lustre to my dream of him. I see him
still in my mind's eye, large, stiff, and unspeakably brilliant,
seated, from respect, as near as possible to our parlour door.
This apparition gave reality to my subsequent conversations with
the soldier doll.

That same victory of the Alma, which was reported in London on my
fifth birthday, is also marked very clearly in my memory by a
family circumstance. We were seated at breakfast, at our small
round table drawn close up to the window, my Father with his back
to the light. Suddenly, he gave a sort of cry, and read out the
opening sentences from _The Times_ announcing a battle in the
valley of the Alma. No doubt the strain of national anxiety had
been very great, for both he and my Mother seemed deeply excited.
He broke off his reading when the fact of the decisive victory
was assured, and he and my Mother sank simultaneously on their
knees in front of their tea and bread-and-butter, while in a loud
voice my Father gave thanks to the God of Battles. This
patriotism was the more remarkable, in that he had schooled
himself, as he believed, to put his 'heavenly citizenship' above
all earthly duties. To those who said: 'Because you are a
Christian, surely you are not less an Englishman?' he would reply
by shaking his head, and by saying: 'I am a citizen of no earthly
State'. He did not realize that, in reality, and to use a cant
phrase not yet coined in 1854, there existed in Great Britain no
more thorough 'Jingo' than he.

Another instance of the remarkable way in which the interests of
daily