Colonial Memories

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A PERSONAL STORY ALMOST the first thing I can remember is listening with fascinated interest to an old gipsy woman, who insisted on telling my fortune one summer afternoon on Cannock Chase long, long ago. I was very reluctant to undergo what seemed to me a terrible ordeal, but I was encouraged to do so by my nurse, to whom she had just promised a knight riding over a plain. However, my Sibyl only touched on two points. First, she looked at my little hand and said I see a stream of gold flowing through your palm. Sometimes it runs full and free, sometimes scant and slow, but it is never quite dry. Then she doubled up my childish fingers and went on, But this hand cannot close on money youll never be rich -an utterance which has come exactly and literally true, and the remembrance of which has often been a comfort to me in hard times. Then she insisted on looking at the sole of my foot, and pronounced that it would wander up and down the earth north and south, east and west, to countries not yet discovered. She concluded by crying dramatically Earth holds no home for you, earth holds no grave youll be drowned. Now, as I must have made something like forty ocean voyages in the course of my life, I may be said to have spent it in tempting my Fate. However that may be, the old womans prophecy was written down at the time, and, so far as the wandering part of it goes, no one who reads these pages can question its truth. Born in Jamaica, where my father was the last Island Secretary, -a Patent Office, held in conjunction with the late Mr. Charles Grevlle of Mernoir fame, and long since divided into four parts-I began to wander to and from England before I was two years old, and had crossed the Atlantic five times by 1852 when I married Captain....