e making which she
had learned in her own country. And in a short time there were
nine or ten young girls of the neighborhood under regular
instruction in this industry.

CHAPTER VI

NANCY BEGINS HER STUDY OF THE LAW

There has been some delay in bringing Hugh Pitcairn into my story, and,
as I read that which I have written, I seem to have set him down in a
scant and dry manner little calculated to do justice to his many
virtues. These virtues, however, were of the kind which made him a fine
citizen rather than a jolly companion over a bowl of brose. He was a
tall man, heavily built, with a large face, thick bristly hair, and
blue eyes set extraordinarily far apart. The bridge of his nose being
noticeably low, this peculiarity gave the upper part of his face the
appearance of being very sparsely settled. It was Robert Burns, I
remember, who made this descriptive observe concerning him. A lowland
body, but kin to the Pitcairns of the north, he had come to the High
School dependent for his education upon the generosity of a rich uncle,
and from the time he entered was easily first in all of his classes. Of
an unbending rectitude, unmerciful in his judgments, analytical,
penetrating, and accumulative, he was at an early age destined for two
things--success and unpopularity. He left the High School with us, to
enter upon the study of the law with Maxwell, of Dalgleish, and rising
rapidly in his profession was at the age of thirty-three recognized as
the soundest, most learned, and bitterest tongued lawyer in Auld
Reekie.

Justice to his mind was a simple thing; a man had either broken the law
or he had not; if he had, he should be punished. "Extenuating
circumstances" was a phrase used only by the sentimental and the
guilty. I recall, as I write, his telling me with some pride and an
amused smile of a certain occasion, when he had wrung a verdict from a
jury against their sympathies, that the spectators had hissed him on
his way out of court.

"He's not a man at all. He's only a Head," Sandy Carmichael said of him
once, and I find enough truth in the statement to make it worth setting
down.

His conceit of himself was high, as is the case with many self-made
men, but he had a fine code of conduct for the direction of his private
affairs, was aggressively honest and fearless, and an earnest believer
in God, himself, and the Scots law.

Like other great men he had his failings, however, and