I had left school forever, with the exception of one winter’s night-schooling in America, and later a French night-teacher for a time, and, strange to say, an elocutionist from whom I learned how to declaim.  I could read, write, and cipher, and had begun the study of algebra and of Latin.  A letter written to my Uncle Lauder during the voyage, and since returned, shows that I was then a better penman than now.  I had wrestled with English grammar, and knew as little of what it was designed to teach as children usually do.  I had read little except about Wallace, Bruce, and Burns; but knew many familiar pieces of poetry by heart.  I should add to this the fairy tales of childhood, and especially the “Arabian Nights,” by which I was carried into a new world.  I was in dreamland as I devoured those stories.

On the morning of the day we started from beloved Dunfermline, in the omnibus that ran upon the coal railroad to Charleston, I remember that I stood with tearful eyes looking out of the window until Dunfermline vanished from view, the last structure to fade being the grand and sacred old Abbey.  During my first fourteen years of absence my thought was almost daily, as it was that morning, “When shall I see you again?” Few days passed in which I did not see in my mind’s eye the talismanic letters on the Abbey tower—­“King Robert The Bruce.”  All my recollections of childhood, all I knew of fairyland, clustered around the old Abbey and its curfew bell, which tolled at eight o’clock every evening and was the signal for me to run to bed before it stopped.  I have referred to that bell in my “American Four-in-Hand in Britain"[10] when passing the Abbey and I may as well quote from it now: 

[Footnote 10:  An American Four-in-Hand in Britain.  New York, 1886.]

As we drove down the Pends I was standing on the front seat of the coach with Provost Walls, when I heard the first toll of the Abbey bell, tolled in honor of my mother and myself.  My knees sank from under me, the tears came rushing before I knew it, and I turned round to tell the Provost that I must give in.  For a moment I felt as if I were about to faint.  Fortunately I saw that there was no crowd before us for a little distance.  I had time to regain control, and biting my lips till they actually bled, I murmured to myself, “No matter, keep cool, you must go on”; but never can there come to my ears on earth, nor enter so deep into my soul, a sound that shall haunt and subdue me with its sweet, gracious, melting power as that did.

By that curfew bell I had been laid in my little couch to sleep the sleep of childish innocence.  Father and mother, sometimes the one, sometimes the other, had told me as they bent lovingly over me night after night, what that bell said as it tolled.  Many good words has that bell spoken to me through their translations.  No wrong thing did I do through the day which that voice from all I knew of heaven and the great