Captain Blackwood and his family arrived in Edinburgh in the early part of 1848. An arrival is an event much less satisfactory to the biographer than a departure, since naturally the letters—that best source of information—fail when the correspondents are no longer parted, and have it in their power to see each other when they will. It cannot be but that something melancholy must always mingle with such a joyful event. The middle-aged soldier who thus returned, bringing if not many sheaves yet the still more valuable acquisition of a second generation with him, had quitted home at sixteen. He had left a most happy and united family, so many brothers and sisters not yet out of childhood, and with the perfect oneness of a house under its natural rulers, with the father, the most active, the most merry, almost the most youthful of them all, open to every touch of sympathy and kindness at their hand. Their family union was still extraordinary, though every circumstance had changed; but it was of course a union with a difference, every member of the household having by this time grown into independence, and taking his and her individual place in the world. There are, perhaps, few things in the intercourse of human life more difficult to arrange than such an arrival, and the settling down of the new family by the side of the old.