4 MEMORIES OF MY LIFE 



to an unreasoning instinct in one of his daughters. 

 She must have been an acceptable customer to her 

 bookbinder on that account, as the number of ex- 

 pensively bound volumes that she ordered from time 

 to time, each neatly ruled in red, and stamped and 

 assigned to some particular subject or year, is hardly 

 credible. I begged for a bagful of them after her 

 death, to keep as a psychological curiosity, and have 

 it still ; the rest were destroyed. She must have 

 collected these costly books to satisfy a pure instinct, 

 for she turned them to no useful account, and rarely 

 filled more than a single page, often not so much of 

 each of them. She habitually used a treble inkstand, 

 with black, red, and blue inks, employing the distinctive 

 colours with little reason, but rather with regard to 

 their pictorial effect. She was perhaps not over-wise, 

 yet she was by no means imbecile, and had many 

 qualities that endeared her to her nephews and 

 nieces. 



Samuel John Galton was a successful man of 

 business. He was a manufacturer, and became a 

 contractor on a large scale for the supply of muskets 

 to the army during the great war. Birmingham 

 offered at that time a good field for the business of a 

 contractor, because its manufactories were many and 

 of moderate size, and central organisations were 

 wanting. The Soho works of Boulton and Watt for 

 steam-engines were almost the only large works at 

 that time. My grandfather prospered in his business 

 as a " Captain of Industry," to use the phrase applied 

 to him in a book treating of Birmingham. He 

 founded a Bank to help it, which was gradually 

 brought to a close some few years after the war had 



