for any Man on Earth.’  Ah My Dear and valuable children, dear is your affection to my heart, but I will never make so base a use of it.  I entreat my Dr John that you will not give yourself one moment’s uneasiness about me—­I will at all events have L86 a year for life that your Father cannot deprive me of, and tho’ I could not live very splendidly in a Town on this, yet with a neat little House and Garden in the country, it would afford all the means of life in fullness to Meggy myself and our servant.  You forget, my Dr how much a woman can do without in domestick affairs to save Money—­a Woman that has any management at all can live with more comfort on L50 a year than a Man could do on two hundred.  There was a year of my life that I maintained myself and two children on twenty pound, the bread too was 1/2 the loave that year:  we did not indeed live very sumptuously nor shall I say our strength improved much but I did not contract one farthing of debt and that to me supplyed the want of luxuries.  Now my Dr John let me never hear a fear expressed on my account; there is no fear of me; make yourself happy and all will be well, and for God sake my beloved Boy take care of your health, take a good drink of porter to dinner and supper and a little Wine now and then, and tell me particularly about yr new Lodgings,” etc.

He returned home to Edinburgh on a visit and arranged a marriage with his cousin Margaret, if she would wait for him until he was safely established; and then he set to work at the responsibilities of creating a new business.  It was a severer task than he had anticipated, for his father’s brain and business, as the above letter hints, had both gone wrong; he left Edinburgh and settled at Bower’s Well, Perth, ended tragically, and left a load of debt behind him, which the son, sensitive to the family honour, undertook to pay before laying by a penny for himself.  It took nine years of assiduous labour and economy.  He worked the business entirely by himself.  The various departments that most men entrust to others he filled in person.  He managed the correspondence, he travelled for orders, he arranged the importation, he directed the growers out in Spain, and gradually built up a great business, paid off his father’s creditors, and secured his own competence.

This was not done without sacrifice of health, which he never recovered, nor without forming habits of over-anxiety and toilsome minuteness which lasted his life long.  But his business cares were relieved by cultured tastes.  He loved art, painted in water-colours in the old style, and knew a good picture when he saw it.  He loved literature, and read aloud finely all the old standard authors, though he was not too old-fashioned to admire “Pickwick” and the “Noctes Ambrosianae” when they appeared.  He loved the scenery and architecture among which he had travelled in Scotland and Spain; but he could find interest in almost any place and any subject; an alert man, in whom practical judgment was joined to a romantic temperament, strong feelings and opinions to extended sympathies.  His letters, of which there are many preserved, bear witness to his character, taste, and intellect, curiously anticipating, on some points, those of his son.  His portraits give the idea of an expressive face, sensitive, refined, every feature a gentleman’s.