2   MEMORIES OF MY LIFE

age of ninety-three and the other at ninety-seven, each with a clear and vigorous mind to nearly the very end of her life. I have hardly any contemporary friends left who could aid in recalling the circumstances of my childhood and boyhood. With rare exceptions, " All, all are gone, the old familiar faces."

I was born on February 16, 1822, at the Larches, near Sparkbrook, Birmingham, with which town my father Samuel Tertius, my grandfather Samuel John, and my great-grandfather Samuel Galton, were all closely connected. Different members of the family had resided or were resident at various points beyond the circumference of the town, in houses then amidst green fields, but now overspread beyond recognition by its hideous outskirts.

My grandfather's place was at Duddeston, then commonly written " Dudson." IIts gardens had been charmingly laid out by my great-grandfather and improved by my grandfather. The house, which was once a centre of refined entertainment, gradually lost its charm of isolation ; later on, it wholly ceased to be attractive as a residence. I t was then leased by my father to the proprietor of a lunatic asylum, because, as he remarked, no one in his senses would live in it. It is now turned into St. Anne's School, with its porticoes and other outer adornments shorn off, and with its once beautiful gardens changed into the sites of railway sidings and gasworks. I remember it distinctly in its beauty in the year 1830, which was two years before my grandfather's death.

The Larches, where I was born, had some three acres of garden and field attached to it, with other fields beyond ; it was a paradise for my child-