PARENTAGE I I
knew. Her method was to fold a strip of paper by doubling, quartering, and so on, into sixteen portions of equal lengths, and to use this strip of paper as a sixteen-foot scale wherewith to draw her rude but graphic plans. One of her children, my dear sister Lucy Harriot Moilliet (z 8o9-1848), had an exceptional faculty for perspective drawing ; she drew elaborate interiors with very little previous instruction.
As to my other brothers and sisters, they were most diverse in character, yet with a certain common resemblance which struck strangers. I shall have occasion to speak more of them later on `in the course of my narrative.
The general result of the foregoing is that I
acknowledge the debt to my progenitors of a con
siderable taste for science, for poetry, and for sta
tistics ; also that I seem to have received, partly
through the Barclay blood, a rather unusual power
of enduring physical fatigue without harmful results,
of which there is much evidence when I was young.
My father had this power in his early manhood, and
it was well marked in my eldest brother and in
others of the family. I suffer now from bronchitis
with occasional asthma, which has been traced to
nay great-grandfather, Samuel Galton, and has de
led ill EI greater or less degree through all his
children who left issue. My father had a strong
constitution otherwise, but he suffered terribly from
hay asthma, which first attacked him as a youth. I
escaped fairly well from any form of it until I was
nearly eighty years old ; and it is not hay that
especially brings it on now, but warm carpeted rooms.
