With my school lessons father made me learn hymns and Bible verses.  For learning “Rock of Ages” he gave me a penny, and I thus became suddenly rich.  Scotch boys are seldom spoiled with money.  We thought more of a penny those economical days than the poorest American schoolboy thinks of a dollar.  To decide what to do with that first penny was an extravagantly serious affair.  I ran in great excitement up and down the street, examining the tempting goodies in the shop windows before venturing on so important an investment.  My playmates also became excited when the wonderful news got abroad that Johnnie Muir had a penny, hoping to obtain a taste of the orange, apple, or candy it was likely to bring forth.

At this time infants were baptized and vaccinated a few days after birth.  I remember very well a fight with the doctor when my brother David was vaccinated.  This happened, I think, before I was sent to school.  I couldn’t imagine what the doctor, a tall, severe-looking man in black, was doing to my brother, but as mother, who was holding him in her arms, offered no objection, I looked on quietly while he scratched the arm until I saw blood.  Then, unable to trust even my mother, I managed to spring up high enough to grab and bite the doctor’s arm, yelling that I wasna gan to let him hurt my bonnie brither, while to my utter astonishment mother and the doctor only laughed at me.  So far from complete at times is sympathy between parents and children, and so much like wild beasts are baby boys, little fighting, biting, climbing pagans.

Father was proud of his garden and seemed always to be trying to make it as much like Eden as possible, and in a corner of it he gave each of us a little bit of ground for our very own in which we planted what we best liked, wondering how the hard dry seeds could change into soft leaves and flowers and find their way out to the light; and, to see how they were coming on, we used to dig up the larger ones, such as peas and beans, every day.  My aunt had a corner assigned to her in our garden which she filled with lilies, and we all looked with the utmost respect and admiration at that precious lily-bed and wondered whether when we grew up we should ever be rich enough to own one anything like so grand.  We imagined that each lily was worth an enormous sum of money and never dared to touch a single leaf or petal of them.  We really stood in awe of them.  Far, far was I then from the wild lily gardens of California that I was destined to see in their glory.

When I was a little boy at Mungo Siddons’s school a flower-show was held in Dunbar, and I saw a number of the exhibitors carrying large handfuls of dahlias, the first I had ever seen.  I thought them marvelous in size and beauty and, as in the case of my aunt’s lilies, wondered if I should ever be rich enough to own some of them.