k called 'The Backwoods of Canada,' which was certainly one of the
most popular of the four-and-sixpenny volumes published under the
auspices of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful and Entertaining
Knowledge. Our friend was Susanna, who wrote a volume of poems on
Enthusiasm, and who seemed to me, with her dark eyes and hair, a very
enthusiastic personage indeed. The reason of her friendship with our
family was her deeply religious nature, which impelled her to leave the
cold and careless service of the Church--not a little to the disgust of
her aristocratic sisters, who, as of ancient lineage, not a little
haughty, and rank Tories, had but little sympathy with Dissent.. Susanna
was much at our house, and when away scarcely a day passed on which she
did not write some of us a letter or send us a book. Then there was a
brother Tom, a midshipman--a wonderful being to my inexperienced
eyes--who once or twice came to our house seated in the family
donkey-chaise, which seemed to me, somehow or other, not to be an
ordinary donkey-chaise, but something of a far superior character. I
have pleasant recollections of them all, and of the annuals in which they
all wrote, and a good many of which fell to my share. Like her sister,
Susanna married an officer in the army--a Major Moodie--and emigrated to
Canada, where the Stricklands have now a high position, where she had
sons and daughters born to her, and wrote more than one novel which found
acceptance in the English market. The Stricklands gave me quite a
literary turn. When I was a small boy it was really an everyday
occurrence for me to write a book or edit a newspaper, and with about as
much success as is generally achieved by bookmakers and newspaper
editors, whose merit is overlooked by an unthinking public. Let me say
in the Stricklands I found an indulgent audience. On one occasion I
remember reciting some verses of my own composition, commencing,

'I sing a song of ancient men,
Of warriors great and bold,
Of Hercules, a famous man,
Who lived in times of old.
He was a man of great renown,
A lion large he slew,
And to his memory games were kept,
Which now I tell to you,'

which they got me to repeat in their drawing-room, and which, though I
say it that should not, evinced for a boy a fair acquaintance with
'Mangnall's Questions' and Pinnock's abridgment of Goldsmith's 'History
of Rome.' Happily, at that time, Niebuhr was unknown, and sceptical