Visiting Uncle and Aunt Handyside and grown-up cousins, whom I left children, I saw a lot of good farming and the easy circumstances which I always associated with tenants’ holdings in East Lothian.  Next farm to Fenton was Fentonbarns, a Show place, which was held by George Hope, a cousin of my grandmother’s He was an exceptional man—­a radical, a freetrader, and a Unitarian.  Cobden died that year.  Uncle Handyside was surprised that George Hope did not go into mourning for him.  John Bright still lived, and he was the bete noire of the Conservatives in that era; and the abolition of the corn laws was held to be the cause of the agricultural ditress—­not the high rent of agricultural land.  George Hope was a striking personality.  When my friend J. C. Woods was minister at St. Mark’s Unitarian Church, Edinburgh, Mr. Hope used to be called the Bishop, though he lived 16 miles off.  When the first Mrs. Woods died, leaving an infant son, it was Mrs. Hope who cared for it till it could go to his relatives in Ireland.  Later he stood for Parliament himself.  In the paper I wrote over the name of Edward Wilson for The Fortnightly I noted how the House of Commons represented the people—­or misrepresented them.  The House consisted of peers and sons of peers, military and naval officers, bankers, brewers, and landownership was represented enormously, but there were only two tenant farmers in the House.  It was years after my return to Australia that I heard of his unsuccessful candidature, and that when he sought to take another lease of Fentonbarns, he was told that under no circumstances would his offer be entertained.  Fentonbarns had been farmed by, three generations of Hopes for 100 years, and to no owner by parchment titles could it have been more dear.  George Hope’s friend, Russell, of The Scotsman, fulminated against the injustice of refusing a lease to the foremost agriculturist in Scotland—­and when you say that you may say of the United Kingdom—­because the tenant held certain political opinions and had the courage to express them.  My uncle Handyside, however, always maintained that his neighbour was the most honourable man in business that he knew, and far from being an atheist or even a deist, he had family prayers, and on the occasion of a death in the family, the funeral service was most impressive.  He was one of the salt of the earth, and the atmosphere was clearer around him for his presence.

But I must give some space to my visit to Melrose, my childhood’s home.  My father’s half-sister Janet Reid was alive and though her two sons were, one at St. Kitts and the other at Grand Canary, she lived with an old husband and her only daughter in Melrose still..  I can never forget the look of tender pity cast on me as I was sitting in our old seat in church, looking at seats filled by another generation.  The paterfamilias, so wonderfully like his father of 1839, and sons and daughters, sitting in the place of uncles and aunts