Ten miles beyond Gretna Green is Ecclefechan—­a little village of stucco houses all stretched out on one street.  Plain, homely, rocky and unromantic is the country round about, and plain, homely and unromantic is the little house where Carlyle was born.  The place is shown the visitor by a good old dame who takes one from room to room, giving a little lecture meanwhile in a mixture of Gaelic and English which was quite beyond my ken.  Several relics of interest are shown, and although the house is almost precisely like all others in the vicinity, imagination throws round it all a roseate wreath of fancies.

It has been left on record that up to the year when Carlyle was married, his “most pleasurable times were those when he enjoyed a quiet pipe with his mother.”

To few men indeed is this felicity vouchsafed.  But for those who have eaten oatmeal porridge in the wayside cottages of bonny Scotland, or who love to linger over “The Cotter’s Saturday Night,” there is a touch of tender pathos in the picture.  The stone floor, the bare, whitewashed walls, the peat smoldering on the hearth, sending out long, fitful streaks that dance among the rafters overhead, and the mother and son sitting there watching the coal—­silent.  The woman takes a small twig from a bundle of sticks, reaches over, lights it, applies it to her pipe, takes a few whiffs and passes the light to her son.  Then they talk in low, earnest tones of man’s duty to man and man’s duty to God.

And it was this mother who first applied the spark that fired Carlyle’s ambition; it was from her that he got the germ of those talents which have made his name illustrious.

Yet this woman could barely read and did not learn to write until her firstborn had gone away from the home nest.  Then it was that she sharpened a gray goose-quill and labored long and patiently, practising with this instrument (said to be mightier than the sword) and with ink she herself had mixed—­all that she might write a letter to her boy; and how sweetly, tenderly homely, and loving are these letters as we read them today!

James Carlyle with his own hands built, in Seventeen Hundred Ninety, this house at Ecclefechan.  The same year he married an excellent woman, a second cousin, by name Janet Carlyle.  She lived but a year.  The poor husband was heartbroken, and declared, as many men under like conditions had done before and have done since, that his sorrow was inconsolable.  And he vowed that he would walk through life and down to his death alone.

But it is a matter for congratulation that he broke his vow.

In two years he married Margaret Aitken—­a serving-woman.  She bore nine children.  Thomas was the eldest and the only one who proved recreant to the religious faith of his fathers.

One of the brothers moved to Shiawassee County, Michigan, where I had the pleasure of calling on him, some years ago.  A hard-headed man, he was:  sensible, earnest, honest, with a stubby beard and a rich brogue.  He held the office of school trustee, also that of pound-master, and I was told that he served his township loyally and well.