ny generations on both sides of intelligent
and respectable people. I think I was well brought up, for my father
and mother were of one mind regarding the care of the family. I count
myself well educated, for the admirable woman at the head of the school
which I attended from the age of four and a half till I was thirteen
and a half, was a born teacher in advance of her own times. In fact.
like my own dear mother, Sarah Phin was a New Woman without knowing it.
The phrase was not known in the thirties.

I was born on October 31, 1825, the fifth of a family of eight born to
David Spence and Helen Brodie, in the romantic village of Melrose, on
the silvery Tweed, close to the three picturesque peaks of the Eildon
Hills, which Michael Scott's familiar spirit split up from one mountain
mass in a single night, according to the legend. It was indeed poetic
ground. It was Sir Walter Scott's ground. Abbotsford was within two
miles of Melrose, and one of my earliest recollections was seeing the
long procession which followed his body to the family vault at Dryburgh
Abbey. There was not a local note in "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" or
in the novels. "The Monastery" and "The Abbot," with which I was not
familiar before I entered my teens. There was not a hill or a burn or a
glen that had not a song or a proverb, or a legend about it. Yarrow
braes were not far off. The broom of the Cowdenknowes was still nearer,
and my mother knew the words as well as the tunes of the minstrelsy of
the Scottish Border. But as all readers of the life of Scott know, he
was a Tory, loving the past with loyal affection, and shrinking from
any change. My father, who was a lawyer (a writer as it was called),
and his father who was a country practitioner, were reformers, and so
it happened that they never came into personal relations with the man
they admired above all men in Scotland. It was the Tory doctor who
attended to his health, and the Tory writer who was consulted about his
affairs.

I look back to a happy childhood. The many anxieties which reached both
my parents were quite unknown to the children till the crisis in 1839.
I do not know that I appreciated the beauty of the village I lived in
so much with my own bodily eyes as through the songs and the
literature, which were current talk. The old Abbey, with its 'prentice
window, and its wonders in stonecarving, that Scott had written about
and Washington Irving marvelled at--"Here lies the race