An Autobiography | Page 4

VIII.
I VISIT EDINBURGH AND LONDON.
CHAPTER IX.
MEETING WITH J. S. MILL AND GEORGE ELIOT.
CHAPTER X.
RETURN FROM THE OLD COUNTRY.
CHAPTER XI
WARDS OF THE STATE.
CHAPTER XII.
PREACHING, FRIENDS, AND WRITING.
CHAPTER XIII.
MY WORK FOR EDUCATION.
CHAPTER XIV.
SPECULATION, CHARITY, AND A BOOK.
CHAPTER XV.
JOURNALISM AND POLITICS.
CHAPTER XVI.

SORROW AND CHANGE.
CHAPTER XVII.
IMPRESSIONS OF AMERICA.
CHAPTER XVIII.
BRITAIN, THE CONTINENT, AND HOME AGAIN.
CHAPTER XIX.
PROGRESS OF EFFECTIVE VOTING.
CHAPTER XX.
WIDENING INTERESTS.
CHAPTER XXI
PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION AND FEDERATION.
CHAPTER XXII.
A VISIT TO NEW SOUTH WALES.
CHAPTER XXIII.
MORE PUBLIC WORK.
CHAPTER XXIV.
THE EIGHTIETH MILESTONE AND THE END.
CHAPTER I.

EARLY LIFE IN SCOTLAND.
Sitting down at the age of eighty-four to give an account of my life, I
feel that it connects itself naturally with the growth and development of
the province of South Australia, to which I came with my family in the
year 1839, before it was quite three years old. But there is much truth in
Wordsworth's line, "the child is father of the man," and no less is the
mother of the woman; and I must go back to Scotland for the roots of
my character and Ideals. I account myself well-born, for My father and
my mother loved each other. I consider myself well descended, going
back for many 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 of the House
of Yair" as a tombstone--had a grand roll in it. In the churchyard of the
old Abbey my people on the Spence side lay buried. In the square or
market place there no longer stood the great tree described in The
Monastery as standing just after Flodden Field, where the flowers of
the forest had been cut down by the English; but in the centre stood the
cross with steps up to it, and close to the cross was the well, to which
twice a day the maids went to draw water for the house until I was nine
years old, when we had pipes and taps laid on. The cross was the place
for any