of logic.  ’The high-school men,’ he writes, ‘and bearded men like myself, were all attention.’  If my grandfather were throughout life a thought too studious of the art of getting on, much must be forgiven to the bearded and belated student who looked across, with a sense of difference, at ‘the high-school men.’  Here was a gulf to be crossed; but already he could feel that he had made a beginning, and that must have been a proud hour when he devoted his earliest earnings to the repayment of the charitable foundation in which he had received the rudiments of knowledge.

In yet another way he followed the example of his father-in-law, and from 1794 to 1807, when the affairs of the Bell Rock made it necessary for him to resign, he served in different corps of volunteers.  In the last of these he rose to a position of distinction, no less than captain of the Grenadier Company, and his colonel, in accepting his resignation, entreated he would do them ’the favour of continuing as an honorary member of a corps which has been so much indebted for your zeal and exertions.’

To very pious women the men of the house are apt to appear worldly.  The wife, as she puts on her new bonnet before church, is apt to sigh over that assiduity which enabled her husband to pay the milliner’s bill.  And in the household of the Smiths and Stevensons the women were not only extremely pious, but the men were in reality a trifle worldly.  Religious they both were; conscious, like all Scots, of the fragility and unreality of that scene in which we play our uncomprehended parts; like all Scots, realising daily and hourly the sense of another will than ours and a perpetual direction in the affairs of life.  But the current of their endeavours flowed in a more obvious channel.  They had got on so far; to get on further was their next ambition—­to gather wealth, to rise in society, to leave their descendants higher than themselves, to be (in some sense) among the founders of families.  Scott was in the same town nourishing similar dreams.  But in the eyes of the women these dreams would be foolish and idolatrous.

I have before me some volumes of old letters addressed to Mrs. Smith and the two girls, her favourites, which depict in a strong light their characters and the society in which they moved.

‘My very dear and much esteemed Friend,’ writes one correspondent, ’this day being the anniversary of our acquaintance, I feel inclined to address you; but where shall I find words to express the fealings of a graitful Heart, first to the Lord who graiciously inclined you on this day last year to notice an afflicted Strainger providentially cast in your way far from any Earthly friend? . . .  Methinks I shall hear him say unto you, “Inasmuch as ye shewed kindness to my afflicted handmaiden, ye did it unto me."’