il man one-half of my unborn father, and one-quarter of
myself, looked out upon us as we went by to college. Nothing of all this
would cross the mind of the young student, as he posted up the Bridges
with trim, stockinged legs, in that city of cocked hats and good Scots
still unadulterated. It would not cross his mind that he should have a
daughter; and the lamp and oil man, just then beginning, by a not
unnatural metastasis, to bloom into a lighthouse-engineer, should have a
grandson; and that these two, in the fulness of time, should wed; and
some portion of that student himself should survive yet a year or two
longer in the person of their child.

But our ancestral adventures are beyond even the arithmetic of fancy;
and it is the chief recommendation of long pedigrees, that we can follow
backward the careers of our _homunculi_ and be reminded of our antenatal
lives. Our conscious years are but a moment in the history of the
elements that build us. Are you a bank-clerk, and do you live at
Peckham? It was not always so. And though to-day I am only a man of
letters, either tradition errs or I was present when there landed at St.
Andrews a French barber-surgeon, to tend the health and the beard of the
great Cardinal Beaton; I have shaken a spear in the Debateable Land and
shouted the slogan of the Elliots; I was present when a skipper, plying
from Dundee, smuggled Jacobites to France after the '15; I was in a West
India merchant's office, perhaps next door to Bailie Nicol Jarvie's, and
managed the business of a plantation in St. Kitt's; I was with my
engineer-grandfather (the son-in-law of the lamp and oil man) when he
sailed north about Scotland on the famous cruise that gave us "The
Pirate" and "The Lord of the Isles"; I was with him, too, on the Bell
Rock, in the fog, when the _Smeaton_ had drifted from her moorings, and
the Aberdeen men, pick in hand, had seized upon the only boats, and he
must stoop and lap sea-water before his tongue could utter audible
words; and once more with him when the Bell Rock beacon took a "thrawe,"
and his workmen fled into the tower, then nearly finished, and he sat
unmoved reading in his Bible--or affecting to read--till one after
another slunk back with confusion of countenance to their engineer. Yes,
parts of me have seen life, and met adventures, and sometimes met them
well. And away in the still cloudier past, the threads that make me up
can be traced by fancy into the bosoms of thou