he butcher a Christian man, and the table suffered. The
scene has been often described to me of my grandfather sawing with
darkened countenance at some indissoluble joint--"Preserve me, my dear,
what kind of a reedy, stringy beast is this?"--of the joint removed, the
pudding substituted and uncovered; and of my grandmother's anxious
glance and hasty, deprecatory comment, "Just mismanaged!" Yet with the
invincible obstinacy of soft natures, she would adhere to the godly
woman and the Christian man, or find others of the same kidney to
replace them. One of her confidants had once a narrow escape; an
unwieldy old woman, she had fallen from an outside stair in a close of
the Old Town; and my grandmother rejoiced to communicate the
providential circumstance that a baker had been passing underneath with
his bread upon his head. "I would like to know what kind of providence
the baker thought it!" cried my grandfather.

But the sally must have been unique. In all else that I have heard or
read of him, so far from criticising, he was doing his utmost to honour
and even to emulate his wife's pronounced opinions. In the only letter
which has come to my hand of Thomas Smith's, I find him informing his
wife that he was "in time for afternoon church "; similar assurances or
cognate excuses abound in the correspondence of Robert Stevenson; and it
is comical and pretty to see the two generations paying the same court
to a female piety more highly strung: Thomas Smith to the mother of
Robert Stevenson--Robert Stevenson to the daughter of Thomas Smith. And
if for once my grandfather suffered himself to be hurried, by his sense
of humour and justice, into that remark about the case of Providence and
the Baker, I should be sorry for any of his children who should have
stumbled into the same attitude of criticism. In the apocalyptic style
of the housekeeper of Invermay, woe be to that person! But there was no
fear; husband and sons all entertained for the pious, tender soul the
same chivalrous and moved affection. I have spoken with one who
remembered her, and who had been the intimate and equal of her sons, and
I found this witness had been struck, as I had been, with a sense of
disproportion between the warmth of the adoration felt and the nature of
the woman, whether as described or observed. She diligently read and
marked her Bible; she was a tender nurse; she had a sense of humour
under strong control; she talked and found some amusemen