together but also to walk hand-in-hand through life, everybody said that it was just what ought to have happened.
In that happy way, rivalry lapsed into love. Miss Lindsay closed her school, and Mr. and Mrs. Seddon took up their residence in the stone cottage on Eccleston Hill, which has just been described.
In that cottage Richard John Seddon was born on June 22nd, 1845, and there he passed his babyhood and his boyhood.
Richard, who was the second child, had three brothers and three sisters. He was a healthy, robust, muscular, and boisterous young lad, and he gave plenty of evidence at an early age of the wilfulness that became one of his characteristics when he entered the battlefield of colonial politics.
The most definite impression left upon him by his early childhood was that made by the funeral of the thirteenth Earl of Derby, when Richard was a sturdy infant six years old. The Earl was a great patron of science, having been president of both the Linnean Society and the Zoological Society of London, and he kept at Knowsley Hall a splendid natural history collection, which had an attraction for the boy, who often made visits to the park. When he heard of the Earl’s death, his first thought was that those happy outings would now have to come to an end, and he was more sorry on that account than on account of the death of the great nobleman. His grandfather’s family were tenants of the Earl, and that association made Knowsley Hall a kind of shrine as far as he was concerned. Every tenant attended the funeral, and every horse in the immense estate was brought into use for the procession. The sight struck the boy as being a most remarkable one. “Through all the morning,” he remarked fifty years later, when he was sending his mind back to those days, “there came to me, even as a child, some knowledge of the deep affection that existed between the Earls of Derby and their tenantry, of which in riper years I have seen many demonstrations.”
Another incident that made a great impression on him as a child was the march past of the Scots Greys on their way to Liverpool to embark for the Crimea. It seemed to him that the steady stream of men would never end.
