es in which his patents
dropped, and then others took up his inventions, and made a commercial
success thereof.

A strange man altogether was that grandfather of mine, whom I can only
remember as a grand-looking old man, with snow-white hair and piercing
hawk's eyes. The merriest of wild Irishmen was he in his youth, and I
have often wished that his biography had been written, if only as a
picture of Dublin society at the time. He had an exquisite voice, and one
night he and some of his wild comrades went out singing through the
streets as beggars. Pennies, sixpences, shillings, and even half-crowns
came showering down in recompense of street music of such unusual
excellence; then the young scamps, ashamed of their gains, poured them
all into the hat of a cripple they met, who must have thought that all
the blessed saints were out that night in the Irish capital. On another
occasion he went to the wake of an old woman who had been bent nearly
double by rheumatism, and had been duly "laid out", and tied down firmly,
so as to keep the body straight in the recumbent position. He hid under
the bed, and when the whisky was flowing freely, and the orgie was at its
height, he cut the ropes with a sharp knife, and the old woman suddenly
sat up in bed, frightening the revellers out of their wits, and, luckily
for my grandfather, out of the room. Many such tales would he tell, with
quaint Irish humor, in his later days. He died, from a third stroke of
paralysis, in 1862.

The Morrises were a very "clannish" family, and my grandfather's house
was the London centre. All the family gathered there on each
Christmastide, and on Christmas day was always held high festival. For
long my brother and I were the only grandchildren within reach, and were
naturally made much of. The two sons were out in India, married, with
young families. The youngest daughter was much away from home, and a
second was living in Constantinople, but three others lived with their
father and mother. Bessie, the eldest of the whole family, was a woman of
rigid honor and conscientiousness, but poverty and the struggle to keep
out of debt had soured her, and "Aunt Bessie" was an object of dread, not
of love. One story of her early life will best tell her character. She
was engaged to a young clergyman, and one day when Bessie was at church
he preached a sermon taken without acknowledgment from some old divine.
The girl's keen sense of honor was shocked at the dece