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MEMORIES OF MY LIFE

to an unreasoning instinct in one of his daughters. She must have been an acceptable customer to her bookbinder on that account, as the number of expensively bound volumes that she ordered from time to time, each neatly ruled in red, and stamped and assigned to some particular subject or year, is hardly credible. I begged for a bagful of them after her death, to keep as a psychological curiosity, and have it still ; the rest were destroyed. She must have collected these costly books to satisfy a pure instinct, for she turned them to no useful account, and rarely filled more than a single page, often not so much of each of them. She habitually used a treble inkstand, with black, red, and blue inks, employing the distinctive colours with little reason, but rather with regard to their pictorial effect. She was perhaps not over-wise, yet she was by no means imbecile, and had many qualities that endeared her to her nephews and nieces.

Samuel John Galton was a successful man of business, lie was a manuf actiurer, -in(.] became a contractor on a large scale for the supply of muskets to the army during the great war. Birmingham offered at that time a good field for the business of a contractor, because its manufactories were many and of moderate size, and central organisations were. wanting. The Soho works of Boulton and Watt for steam-engines were almost the only large works at that time. My grandfather prospered in his business as a "Captain of Industry," to use the phrase applied to him in a book treating of Birmingham. He founded a Bank to help it, which was gradually brought to a close some few years after the war had