onths, and he returned to find his mother dead, and two or three
little brothers and sisters dead and buried, and his father married
again to his mother's cousin, Katherine Swanston, an old maid of 45,
who, however, two years afterwards was the mother of a fine big
daughter, so that Aunt Helen Park's scheme for getting the money for
her sister's children failed. In spite of my father's strong wish to be
a farmer, and not a writer or attorney, there was no capital to start a
farm upon, so he was indentured to Mr. Erskine, and after some years
began business in Melrose for himself, and married Lelen (Helen?)
Brodie. His elder brother John went as a surgeon in the Royal
Navy--before he was twenty-one. The demand for surgeons was great
during the war time. He was made a Freemason before the set age,
because in case of capture friends from the fraternity might be of
great use. He did not like his original profession, especially when
after the peace he must be a country practitioner like his father, at
every one's beck and call, so he was articled to his brother, and lived
in the house till he married and settled at Earlston, five miles off.
Uncle John Spence was a scholarly man, shy but kindly, who gave to us
children most of the books we possessed. They were not in such
abundance as children read nowadays, but they were read and re-read.

In these early readings the Calvinistic teaching of the church and the
shorter catechism was supported and exemplified. The only secular books
to counteract them were the "Evenings at Home" and Miss Edgeworth's
"Tales for Young and Old!" The only cloud on my young life was the
gloomy religion, which made me doubt of my own salvation and despair of
the salvation of any but a very small proportion of the people in the
world. Thus the character of God appeared unlovely, and it was wicked
not to love God; and this was my condemnation. I had learned the
shorter catechism with the proofs from Scripture, and I understood the
meaning of the dogmatic theology. Watts's hymns were much more easy to
learn, but the doctrine was the same. There was no getting away from
the feeling that the world was under a curse ever since that unlucky
appleeating in the garden of Eden. Why, oh! why had not the sentence of
death been carried out at once, and a new start made with more prudent
people? The school in which as a day scholar I passed nine years of my
life was more literary than many which were more pretentio