Souvemrs 
haired, ruddy-cheeked, he was a fine specimen 
of a hard-working farmer; and I wish I had 
asked him whether it was true, as once or twice 
I heard, that he was somehow related to me. It 
can hardly have been though (now I come to 
consider it) that he was the Richard Young of 
this genealogy, born 1796—a cousin of my 
grandfather. Yet, if he was of a later generation, 
I am glad to have set eyes on him, glad to have 
known his mild, grey-eyed, almost apologetic 
manner. I think of him as a South-country 
illu%tration of those Scotsmen in Stevenson’s 
verse, “‘ Where the old plain men have rosy 
faces’’; for that was the Richard Young I knew 
—probably a son of the man mentioned in 
William Smith’s genealogy, and not the very 
man himself. Old, plain, rosy-faced, of sterling 
and quiet character, capable at all laborious farm- 
work, plainly he was contented to be a nobody 
as long as he could be it with dignity. 
, Bearing him in mind, I return to that genealogy 
to indicate the one point in it that takes hold of 
me—the conneétion of John Smith’s ancestors 
with Ash. His great-grandparents belonged 
apparently to that parish: his grandfather, an 
Ash man, married a girl of the same village; 
and behold, in my own time, Richard Young, a 
cousin, turns up from Ash too. 
What is there in it? Ash always struck me 
167 
