CHAPTER I. PARENTAGE, BIRTH, EARLY INFLUENCES. "As in a building Stone rests on stone, and wanting the foundation GEORGE HARRY AUGUSTUS AGNEW was the fourth son and youngest child of William and Jane Agnew, both of whom were natives of Ulster in Ireland, and were sprung from those Presbyterian tenant-farmers of the North whose hatred of Popery, and loyalty, even to the stake, have become proverbial among AngloSaxon peoples. His more remote ancestors contributed in some degree to the making of history in their day. A large granite monument in an Ulster village churchyard testifies to the zeal and services of his paternal grandfather, Samuel Agnew, in the short but fierce Irish rebellion of 1798, during which this farmer soldier fought as a sergeant in the hastily-raised yeomanry of that time. William Agnew, Harry's father, was an honorable and upright man, free from all bad habits, a great reader, and accustomed, through much of his life, to rise early every morning, hasten to the beach and take an invigorating bath before breakfast. His mother, Jane Agnew, was a loving, gentle, intelligent, devout and godly woman-to the close of his life Harry's ideal of Christian womanhood. Even now, in her advanced age, she maintains the rigid, practical devotion of her earlier years, attending church service three or four times a week, and seldom for any cause missing attendance at the mid-week prayer meeting. Mrs. Agnew, Harry's widow, in a personal letter to the writer dated January 28, 1904, says: "I saw her in England last May. At once I saw whom Harry took after in his loving disposition-it was his mother." At the time when the story of Harry's life begins the parents were in England, the father, who spent most of his adult life as a British soldier, having, after a term of army service abroad, settled as an artisan in the ordnance department at Sheerness. Here the subject of our story was born October 17, 1864. His somewhat grandiose combination of Christian names, we are informed, came partly from an uncle, who, in his turn, derived it from a chief landlord of the Ulster territory. Numerous as were his given names, however, Harry is the only name by which the hero of our story was ever called-the name by which, in later as in earlier life, he was endeared to all who knew him. In the Agnew family there were four boys and four girls, six of whom are still living, although widely scattered. One of the daughters resides in Australia, another, the one who was instrumental in Harry's conversion, an account of which appears later, makes her home in New Zealand, and a third, who chiefly cared for Harry in his infancy, spent eleven years in India, with her husband who was a soldier, but now cares for the aged mother in Scarborough, England. The oth |