r should be the culmination of the
peace, after the long Napoleonic war. When my father married in 1815 he
showed he was making 600 pounds a year, with 2,000 pounds book debts,
as a writer or attorney and as agent for a bank. But the business fell
off, the book debts could not be collected; the bank called up the
advances; and for 24 years there was a struggle. My mother would not
have her dowry of 1,500 pounds and other money left by an aunt settled
on herself--neither her father nor herself approved of it--the wife's
fortune should come and go with her husband's. My father first
speculated in hops and lost heavily. He took up unlucky people, whom
other business men had drained. I suppose he caught at straws. He had
the gentlest of manners--"the politest man in Melrose," the old
shoemaker called him. My paternal grandfather was Dr. William Spence,
of Melrose. His father was minister of the Established Church at
Cockburn's Path, Berwickshire. His grandfather was a small landed
proprietor, but he had to sell Spence's mains, and the name was changed
to Chirnside. So (as my father used to say) he was sprung from the tail
of the gentry; while my mother was descended from the head of the
commonalty. The Brodies had been tenant farmers in East Lothian for six
or seven generations, though they originally came from the north. My
grandfather Brodie thought abrogation of the Corn Laws meant ruin for
the farmers, who had taken 19 years' leases at war prices. But during
the war times both landlords and farmers coined money, while the
labourers had high prices for food and very little increase in their
wages. I recollect both grandfathers well, and through the accurate
memory of my mother t can tell how middle-class people in lowland
Scotland lived and dressed and travelled, entertained visitors, and
worshipped God. She told me of the "dear years" 1799 and 1800, and what
a terrible thing a bad crop was, when the foreign ports were closed by
Napoleon. She told me that but for the shortlived Peace of Amiens she
never heard of anything but war till the Battle of Waterloo settled it
three months before her marriage. From her own intimate relations with
her grandmother, Margaret Fernie Brodie, who was born in 1736, and died
in 1817, she knew how two generations before her people lived and
thought. So that I have a grasp on the past which many might envy, and
yet the present and the future are even more to me, as they were to my
mother. On