de, the younger
members of the family encountered other and harder days.

The second daughter, Margaret, was my mother, about whom I cannot
trust myself to speak at length. She inherited from her mother the
dignity, refinement, and air of the cultivated lady. Perhaps some day
I may be able to tell the world something of this heroine, but I doubt
it. I feel her to be sacred to myself and not for others to know. None
could ever really know her--I alone did that. After my father's early
death she was all my own. The dedication of my first book[4] tells the
story. It was: "To my favorite Heroine My Mother."

[Footnote 4: _An American Four-in-Hand in Great Britain._ New York,
1888.]

[Illustration: DUNFERMLINE ABBEY]

Fortunate in my ancestors I was supremely so in my birthplace. Where
one is born is very important, for different surroundings and
traditions appeal to and stimulate different latent tendencies in the
child. Ruskin truly observes that every bright boy in Edinburgh is
influenced by the sight of the Castle. So is the child of Dunfermline,
by its noble Abbey, the Westminster of Scotland, founded early in the
eleventh century (1070) by Malcolm Canmore and his Queen Margaret,
Scotland's patron saint. The ruins of the great monastery and of
the Palace where kings were born still stand, and there, too, is
Pittencrieff Glen, embracing Queen Margaret's shrine and the ruins of
King Malcolm's Tower, with which the old ballad of "Sir Patrick Spens"
begins:

"The King sits in Dunfermline _tower_,[5]
Drinking the bluid red wine."

[Footnote 5: _The Percy Reliques_ and _The Oxford Book of Ballads_
give "town" instead of "tower"; but Mr. Carnegie insisted that it
should be "tower."]

The tomb of The Bruce is in the center of the Abbey, Saint Margaret's
tomb is near, and many of the "royal folk" lie sleeping close around.
Fortunate, indeed, the child who first sees the light in that romantic
town, which occupies high ground three miles north of the Firth of
Forth, overlooking the sea, with Edinburgh in sight to the south, and
to the north the peaks of the Ochils clearly in view. All is still
redolent of the mighty past when Dunfermline was both nationally and
religiously the capital of Scotland.

The child privileged to develop amid such surroundings absorbs poetry
and romance with the air he breathes, assimilates history and
tradition as he gazes around. These become to him his real world in
childhood--the