and he happened to leave the palace at the moment when the British Minister was entering it for the purpose of demanding justice upon the perpetrators of the atrocity, of which he had just been informed. The delinquents, except this wretch, were all executed." The visit of Mr. Whiteside was made in 1846.
In 1847 my brother and I caught the whooping-cough, and it was supposed that my lungs were affected. I am confident that such was not the case. I was taken to London to be examined by Sir James Clarke, who advised a winter in the South of France. Nothing could have suited my father better. Arrangements were at once made for a visit to Pau in the Basses Pyrénées; and a Mr. Williams, a Cambridge graduate, was engaged as my tutor, he being a good mathematician, which with my father was a sine qua non. Of this arrangement more in the sequel.
It was unfortunate in one way that I was taken from public-school life, as my father had three theories with regard to education, which by this means he was able to indulge without counteracting influences. One was that every child's mind is a blank, on which it is possible to write whatever the parent desires. Acting on this principle, I was educated to be a mathematician. At the present day I cannot do a compound addition sum. An ordinary addition I work out on my fingers. His second theory was that the memory should not be cultivated, but that the intelligence should be stimulated. "Do not grow up to be a parrot," he was wont to say. Consequently we were not suffered to learn any poetry or dates by heart. The result has been that at the present moment, and, in fact, through over seventy years of my life I have been able to recollect but one single date, that of the Conquest, 1066. For some years I hugged the idea that I was acquainted with the year of Creation, which was One, till I had it pointed out to me that this was a mistake, it should be Nought, and that the year One did not begin till the end of the first twelve months.
As to accuracy in the acquisition of any portion of literature, I never obtained it. But what I did obtain, and for which I am grateful to my father, was a faculty of reading a book or a chapter or a paragraph, and getting hold of its purport and the main facts it contained.
Our memories are injured by the amount of daily reading of
