reen is Ecclefechan--a little village of stucco
houses all stretched out on one street. Plain, homely, rocky and
unromantic is the country round about, and plain, homely and unromantic
is the little house where Carlyle was born. The place is shown the
visitor by a good old dame who takes one from room to room, giving a
little lecture meanwhile in a mixture of Gaelic and English which was
quite beyond my ken. Several relics of interest are shown, and although
the house is almost precisely like all others in the vicinity,
imagination throws round it all a roseate wreath of fancies.

It has been left on record that up to the year when Carlyle was married,
his "most pleasurable times were those when he enjoyed a quiet pipe with
his mother."

To few men indeed is this felicity vouchsafed. But for those who have
eaten oatmeal porridge in the wayside cottages of bonny Scotland, or who
love to linger over "The Cotter's Saturday Night," there is a touch of
tender pathos in the picture. The stone floor, the bare, whitewashed
walls, the peat smoldering on the hearth, sending out long, fitful
streaks that dance among the rafters overhead, and the mother and son
sitting there watching the coal--silent. The woman takes a small twig
from a bundle of sticks, reaches over, lights it, applies it to her pipe,
takes a few whiffs and passes the light to her son. Then they talk in
low, earnest tones of man's duty to man and man's duty to God.

And it was this mother who first applied the spark that fired Carlyle's
ambition; it was from her that he got the germ of those talents which
have made his name illustrious.

Yet this woman could barely read and did not learn to write until her
firstborn had gone away from the home nest. Then it was that she
sharpened a gray goose-quill and labored long and patiently, practising
with this instrument (said to be mightier than the sword) and with ink
she herself had mixed--all that she might write a letter to her boy; and
how sweetly, tenderly homely, and loving are these letters as we read
them today!

James Carlyle with his own hands built, in Seventeen Hundred Ninety, this
house at Ecclefechan. The same year he married an excellent woman, a
second cousin, by name Janet Carlyle. She lived but a year. The poor
husband was heartbroken, and declared, as many men under like conditions
had done before and have done since, that his sorrow was inconsolable.
And he vowed that he would walk through life an