When I arrived at the old home I found Aunt Mary vigorously rubbing her hand and wrist (she had slipped downstairs in a neighbour’s house, and broken her arm, and had to drive home before she could have it set).  No one from the neighbour’s house went to accompany her; no one came to enquire; no message was sent.  When she recovered so far as to be able to be out, she met at Dunbar the gentleman and lady also driving in their conveyance.  They greeted each other, and aunt could not resist the temptation to say:—­“I am so glad to see you, and so glad that you have spoken to me, for I thought you were so offended at my taking the liberty of breaking my arm in your house that you did not mean to speak to me again.”  This little expression of what the French call malice, not the English meaning, was the only instance I can recollect of Aunt Mary’s not putting the kindest construction on everybody’s words and actions.  But when I think of the love that Aunt Mary gathered to herself from brothers, sisters, nephews, nieces, cousins, and friends—­it seems as if the happiest wife and mother of a large family could not reckon up as rich stores of affection.  She was the unfailing correspondent of those members of the family who were separated by land and ocean from the old home, the link that often bound these together, the most tolerant to their failings, the most liberal in her aid—­full of suggestions, as well as of sympathy.  Now, in my Aunt Margaret’s enfeebled state, she was the head of the house and the director of all things.  Although she had differed from the then two single sisters and the family generally at the time of the disruption of the Church of Scotland, and gone over to the Free Church, the more intensely Calvinistic of the two, though accepting the same standards—­the Westminster Confession and the Shorter Catechism—­all the harsher features fell off the living texture of her faith like cold water off a duck’s back.  From natural preference she chose for her devotions those parts of the Bible which I selected with deliberate intention.  She wondered to find so much spiritual kinship with me, when I built on such a different foundation.  When I suggested that the 109th Psalm, which she read as the allotted portion in “Fletcher’s Family Devotions,” was not fit to be read in a Christian household, she said meekly—­“You are quite right, I shall mark it, and never read it again.”

My mother always thought me like her sister Mary, and when I asked Mr. Taylor if he saw any resemblance between us, he said, with cruel candour—­“Oh, no.  Your Aunt Mary is a very handsome woman.”  But in ways and manners, both my sister Mary and myself had considerable resemblances to our mother’s favourite sister; and I can see traces of it in my own nieces.  There can be no direct descent from maiden aunts, though the working ants and bees do not inherit their industrious habits from either male or female parents, but from their maiden aunts.  Galton’s theory, that potentialities not utilized