One cause of misery there was, however, in my school experience.  The boys nicknamed me “Martin’s pet,” and sometimes called out that dreadful epithet to me as I passed along the street.  I did not know all that it meant, but it seemed to me a term of the utmost opprobrium, and I know that it kept me from responding as freely as I should otherwise have done to that excellent teacher, my only schoolmaster, to whom I owe a debt of gratitude which I regret I never had opportunity to do more than acknowledge before he died.

I may mention here a man whose influence over me cannot be overestimated, my Uncle Lauder, George Lauder’s father.[9] My father was necessarily constantly at work in the loom shop and had little leisure to bestow upon me through the day.  My uncle being a shopkeeper in the High Street was not thus tied down.  Note the location, for this was among the shopkeeping aristocracy, and high and varied degrees of aristocracy there were even among shopkeepers in Dunfermline.  Deeply affected by my Aunt Seaton’s death, which occurred about the beginning of my school life, he found his chief solace in the companionship of his only son, George, and myself.  He possessed an extraordinary gift of dealing with children and taught us many things.  Among others I remember how he taught us British history by imagining each of the monarchs in a certain place upon the walls of the room performing the act for which he was well known.  Thus for me King John sits to this day above the mantelpiece signing the Magna Charta, and Queen Victoria is on the back of the door with her children on her knee.

[Footnote 9:  The Lauder Technical College given by Mr. Carnegie to Dunfermline was named in honor of this uncle, George Lauder.]

It may be taken for granted that the omission which, years after, I found in the Chapter House at Westminster Abbey was fully supplied in our list of monarchs.  A slab in a small chapel at Westminster says that the body of Oliver Cromwell was removed from there.  In the list of the monarchs which I learned at my uncle’s knee the grand republican monarch appeared writing his message to the Pope of Rome, informing His Holiness that “if he did not cease persecuting the Protestants the thunder of Great Britain’s cannon would be heard in the Vatican.”  It is needless to say that the estimate we formed of Cromwell was that he was worth them “a’ thegither.”

It was from my uncle I learned all that I know of the early history of Scotland—­of Wallace and Bruce and Burns, of Blind Harry’s history, of Scott, Ramsey, Tannahill, Hogg, and Fergusson.  I can truly say in the words of Burns that there was then and there created in me a vein of Scottish prejudice (or patriotism) which will cease to exist only with life.  Wallace, of course, was our hero.  Everything heroic centered in him.  Sad was the day when a wicked big boy at school told me that England was far larger than Scotland.  I went to the uncle, who had the remedy.