I cannot deny but I was sometimes tempted to knock my Uncle Adam down; and indeed I believe it must have come to a rupture at last, if they had not given a dinner party at which I was the lion.  On this occasion, I learned (to my surprise and relief) that the incivility to which I had been subjected was a matter for the family circle and might be regarded almost in the light of an endearment.  To strangers I was presented with consideration; and the account given of “my American brother-in-law, poor Janie’s man, James K. Dodd, the well-known millionnaire of Muskegon,” was calculated to enlarge the heart of a proud son.

An aged assistant of my grandfather’s, a pleasant, humble creature with a taste for whiskey, was at first deputed to be my guide about the city.  With this harmless but hardly aristocratic companion, I went to Arthur’s Seat and the Calton Hill, heard the band play in the Princes Street Gardens, inspected the regalia and the blood of Rizzio, and fell in love with the great castle on its cliff, the innumerable spires of churches, the stately buildings, the broad prospects, and those narrow and crowded lanes of the old town where my ancestors had lived and died in the days before Columbus.

But there was another curiosity that interested me more deeply—­my grandfather, Alexander Loudon.  In his time, the old gentleman had been a working mason, and had risen from the ranks more, I think, by shrewdness than by merit.  In his appearance, speech, and manners, he bore broad marks of his origin, which were gall and wormwood to my Uncle Adam.  His nails, in spite of anxious supervision, were often in conspicuous mourning; his clothes hung about him in bags and wrinkles like a ploughman’s Sunday coat; his accent was rude, broad, and dragging:  take him at his best, and even when he could be induced to hold his tongue, his mere presence in a corner of the drawing-room, with his open-air wrinkles, his scanty hair, his battered hands, and the cheerful craftiness of his expression, advertised the whole gang of us for a self-made family.  My aunt might mince and my cousins bridle; but there was no getting over the solid, physical fact of the stonemason in the chimney-corner.

That is one advantage of being an American:  it never occurred to me to be ashamed of my grandfather, and the old gentleman was quick to mark the difference.  He held my mother in tender memory, perhaps because he was in the habit of daily contrasting her with Uncle Adam, whom he detested to the point of frenzy; and he set down to inheritance from his favourite my own becoming treatment of himself.  On our walks abroad, which soon became daily, he would sometimes (after duly warning me to keep the matter dark from “Aadam”) skulk into some old familiar pot-house; and there (if he had the luck to encounter any of his veteran cronies) he would present me to the company with manifest pride, casting at the same time a covert slur on the rest of his descendants.  “This is my Jeannie’s