ther foreigners, it may
be explained that "W.S." is a condensation of "Writers to the Signet"--a
species of beatified solicitor holding a position so esteemed, so
enviable, and so intensely reputable that the only scandal previously
whispered in connection with a member of this class proved innocently
explicable upon the discovery that he was affianced to the lady's aunt.
The building in which the firm had their office formed one end of an
austere range of dark stone houses overlooking a street paved with cubes
of granite and confronted by a precisely similar line of houses on the
farther side. The whole sloped somewhat steeply down a hill, up which
and down which a stimulating breeze careered and eddied during three
hundred days of the year. Had you thrust your head out of the office
windows and looked down the street, you could have seen, generally
beneath a gray sky and through a haze of smoke, an inspiring glimpse of
distant sea with yet more distant hills beyond. But Mr. Walkingshaw had
no time for looking gratis out of his window to see unprofitable views.
The gray street had been the background to nearly fifty years of
dignified labor on behalf of the most respectable clients.

His full name was James Heriot Walkingshaw, but it had been early
recognized that "James" was too brief a designation and "Jimmie" too
trivial for one of his parts and presence, and so he was universally
known as Heriot Walkingshaw. His antecedents were as respectable as his
clients. One of his eight great-great-grandfathers owned a landed estate
in the county of Peebles, one of his maternal uncles was a theological
professor in the University of Aberdeen, and his father before him had
been a W.S. Young Heriot himself was brought up on porridge, the tawse,
the Shorter Catechism, and an allowance of five shillings a week. His
parents were both prudent and pious. Throughout such portions of the
Sabbath as they did not spend with their offspring in their pew, they
kept them indoors behind drawn blinds. His mother kissed young Heriot
seldom and severely (with a cold smack like a hailstone), and never
permitted him to remain ten minutes in the same room with a housemaid
unchaperoned. His father never allowed him to sleep under more than two
blankets, and locked the front door at nine o'clock in summer and six in
winter.

The supreme merit of this system in insuring the survival of the fittest
was seen in its results. Heriot's elder brother pas