a sense of difference, at "the high-school men."
Here was a gulf to be crossed; but already he could feel that he had
made a beginning, and that must have been a proud hour when he devoted
his earliest earnings to the repayment of the charitable foundation in
which he had received the rudiments of knowledge.

In yet another way he followed the example of his father-in-law, and
from 1794 to 1807, when the affairs of the Bell Rock made it necessary
for him to resign, he served in different corps of volunteers. In the
last of these he rose to a position of distinction, no less than captain
of the Grenadier Company, and his colonel, in accepting his resignation,
entreated he would do them "the favour of continuing as an honorary
member of a corps which has been so much indebted for your zeal and
exertions."

To very pious women the men of the house are apt to appear worldly. The
wife, as she puts on her new bonnet before church, is apt to sigh over
that assiduity which enabled her husband to pay the milliner's bill. And
in the household of the Smiths and Stevensons the women were not only
extremely pious, but the men were in reality a trifle worldly. Religious
they both were; conscious, like all Scots, of the fragility and
unreality of that scene in which we play our uncomprehended parts; like
all Scots, realising daily and hourly the sense of another will than
ours and a perpetual direction in the affairs of life. But the current
of their endeavours flowed in a more obvious channel. They had got on so
far; to get on further was their next ambition--to gather wealth, to
rise in society, to leave their descendants higher than themselves, to
be (in some sense) among the founders of families. Scott was in the same
town nourishing similar dreams. But in the eyes of the women these
dreams would be foolish and idolatrous.

I have before me some volumes of old letters addressed to Mrs. Smith and
the two girls, her favourites, which depict in a strong light their
characters and the society in which they moved.

"My very dear and much esteemed Friend," writes one correspondent,
"this day being the anniversary of our acquaintance, I feel inclined
to address you; but where shall I find words to express the fealings
of a graitful _Heart_, first to the Lord who graiciously inclined you
on this day last year to notice an afflicted Strainger providentially
cast in your way far from any Earthly friend?... Methinks I sh