A NOTABLE MID-VICTORIAN.

Evening Star, Issue 18375, 8 September 1923, Page 9

A NOTABLE MID-VICTORIAN.

' r ' '■■ ■ ■" 1 < ! > f o-dav a lady who has been telling what it ■was like wiifii sin; livetl ;n UH- days when children were taken from their cribs at 7 in the morning and plunged overhead by nurses into a bath of cold water, and the practice of country doctors was simply to bleed then- patients, and murderers’ bodies hung in gibbets, and the ladic-s of Edinburgh went about in sedan chairs (states a writer in the Manchester ‘ Guardian ’). And this lady has her wireless set and has seen aeroplanes in the sky, and one would not bo surprised to hear that she lias travelled in one.

Mrs Haldane, the mother of Lord Haldane, who has given ns these reminiscences in a delightful article she has written for the magazine of St. Cohmiba’s Church, the chief Scottish church in London, is surely herself one of the wonders of our time. She was born in 1825, and was eleven years old when ' Pickwick Papers ’ were coming out. She probably knew people who had fought at Waterloo and Trafalgar. To-day she lives at Cloan, in Perthshire, and follows the events and movements of the day with all keenness. It is now clear that with such a mother, who could read when she was three, and at the age of ten read Voltaire, Lord Haldane could not have prevented him-,, self reaching eminence.