t deputed to be my guide about the city.
With this harmless but hardly aristocratic companion, I went to Arthur's
Seat and the Calton Hill, heard the band play in the Princes Street
Gardens, inspected the regalia and the blood of Rizzio, and fell in love
with the great castle on its cliff, the innumerable spires of churches,
the stately buildings, the broad prospects, and those narrow and crowded
lanes of the old town where my ancestors had lived and died in the days
before Columbus.

But there was another curiosity that interested me more deeply--my
grandfather, Alexander Loudon. In his time, the old gentleman had been a
working mason, and had risen from the ranks more, I think, by shrewdness
than by merit. In his appearance, speech, and manners, he bore broad
marks of his origin, which were gall and wormwood to my Uncle Adam.
His nails, in spite of anxious supervision, were often in conspicuous
mourning; his clothes hung about him in bags and wrinkles like a
ploughman's Sunday coat; his accent was rude, broad, and dragging: take
him at his best, and even when he could be induced to hold his tongue,
his mere presence in a corner of the drawing-room, with his open-air
wrinkles, his scanty hair, his battered hands, and the cheerful
craftiness of his expression, advertised the whole gang of us for a
self-made family. My aunt might mince and my cousins bridle; but there
was no getting over the solid, physical fact of the stonemason in the
chimney-corner.

That is one advantage of being an American: it never occurred to me to
be ashamed of my grandfather, and the old gentleman was quick to mark
the difference. He held my mother in tender memory, perhaps because
he was in the habit of daily contrasting her with Uncle Adam, whom he
detested to the point of frenzy; and he set down to inheritance from
his favourite my own becoming treatment of himself. On our walks abroad,
which soon became daily, he would sometimes (after duly warning me
to keep the matter dark from "Aadam") skulk into some old familiar
pot-house; and there (if he had the luck to encounter any of his veteran
cronies) he would present me to the company with manifest pride, casting
at the same time a covert slur on the rest of his descendants. "This is
my Jeannie's yin," he would say. "He's a fine fallow, him." The purpose
of our excursions was not to seek antiquities or to enjoy famous
prospects, but to visit one after another a series of doleful suburbs,
for