Thereafter the expression of the one fearful word was a great point.  Ministers could say “damnation” in the pulpit without sin, and so we, too, had full range on “hell” in recitation.  Another passage made a deep impression.  In the fight between Norval and Glenalvon, Norval says, “When we contend again our strife is mortal.”  Using these words in an article written for the “North American Review” in 1897, my uncle came across them and immediately sat down and wrote me from Dunfermline that he knew where I had found the words.  He was the only man living who did.

My power to memorize must have been greatly strengthened by the mode of teaching adopted by my uncle.  I cannot name a more important means of benefiting young people than encouraging them to commit favorite pieces to memory and recite them often.  Anything which pleased me I could learn with a rapidity which surprised partial friends.  I could memorize anything whether it pleased me or not, but if it did not impress me strongly it passed away in a few hours.

One of the trials of my boy’s life at school in Dunfermline was committing to memory two double verses of the Psalms which I had to recite daily.  My plan was not to look at the psalm until I had started for school.  It was not more than five or six minutes’ slow walk, but I could readily master the task in that time, and, as the psalm was the first lesson, I was prepared and passed through the ordeal successfully.  Had I been asked to repeat the psalm thirty minutes afterwards the attempt would, I fear, have ended in disastrous failure.

The first penny I ever earned or ever received from any person beyond the family circle was one from my school-teacher, Mr. Martin, for repeating before the school Burns’s poem, “Man was made to Mourn.”  In writing this I am reminded that in later years, dining with Mr. John Morley in London, the conversation turned upon the life of Wordsworth, and Mr. Morley said he had been searching his Burns for the poem to “Old Age,” so much extolled by him, which he had not been able to find under that title.  I had the pleasure of repeating part of it to him.  He promptly handed me a second penny.  Ah, great as Morley is, he wasn’t my school-teacher, Mr. Martin—­the first “great” man I ever knew.  Truly great was he to me.  But a hero surely is “Honest John” Morley.

In religious matters we were not much hampered.  While other boys and girls at school were compelled to learn the Shorter Catechism, Dod and I, by some arrangement the details of which I never clearly understood, were absolved.  All of our family connections, Morrisons and Lauders, were advanced in their theological as in their political views, and had objections to the catechism, I have no doubt.  We had not one orthodox Presbyterian in our family circle.  My father, Uncle and Aunt Aitken, Uncle Lauder, and also my Uncle Carnegie, had fallen away from the tenets of Calvinism.  At a later day most of them found refuge for a time in the doctrines of Swedenborg.  My mother was always reticent upon religious subjects.  She never mentioned these to me nor did she attend church, for she had no servant in those early days and did all the housework, including cooking our Sunday dinner.  A great reader, always, Channing the Unitarian was in those days her special delight.  She was a marvel!