"This Was Privately Issued
In 1832, When The Duchesse D'Angouleme Was Living At Edinburgh, And The
Little Work Was Inscribed To Her, With Whom An Accident Of Neighbourhood
And Her Kindness To The Major's Youngest Child Had Brought Him Into
Relations Of Goodwill."[8]
Henry Yule's childhood was mainly spent at Inveresk.
He used to say that
his earliest recollection was sitting with the little cousin, who long
after became his wife, on the doorstep of her father's house in George
Street, Edinburgh (now the Northern Club), listening to the performance of
a passing piper. There was another episode which he recalled with humorous
satisfaction. Fired by his father's tales of the jungle, Yule (then about
six years old) proceeded to improvise an elephant pit in the back garden,
only too successfully, for soon, with mingled terror and delight, he saw
his uncle John[9] fall headlong into the snare. He lost his mother before
he was eight, and almost his only remembrance of her was the circumstance
of her having given him a little lantern to light him home on winter
nights from his first school. On Sundays it was the Major's custom to lend
his children, as a picture-book, a folio Arabic translation of the Four
Gospels, printed at Rome in 1591, which contained excellent illustrations
from Italian originals.[10] Of the pictures in this volume Yule seems
never to have tired. The last page bore a MS. note in Latin to the effect
that the volume had been read in the Chaldaean Desert by Georgius
Strachanus, Milnensis, Scotus, who long remained unidentified, not to say
mythical, in Yule's mind.
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