For her inner circle Peggy Paton was a most motherly old maid. She it
was who, when she found her niece Eliza _would_ marry Lieutenant Burton,
mediated between father and daughter, and arranged matters as well as
might be in an affair in which her good sense found much to disapprove,
and her heart much to excuse. Not only to her niece Margaret, her
adopted daughter, but also to her other nieces at Grandholm, motherless
by death, and fatherless by desertion, did she fill a mother's part as
far as these robust virgins would permit her. Sister Eliza's rough
little children, or rougher great boys, always found kindness in the
house in the Old Town, first in their grand-aunt's[4] time, and
afterwards in that of her successor, Mrs Brown. David, Dr Burton's
younger brother, was lovingly tended by them during part of the
lingering illness of which he died, and the youngest of Eliza Paton's
sons remained an inmate of Mrs Brown's house that he might continue his
education in Aberdeen, when his mother removed to Edinburgh.

[Footnote 4: It may not be counted indelicate, as it refers to a period
120 years gone by, to mention that Peggy Paton once had a lover, and
that this, her first lover, was no other than the son of that Moir of
Stoneywood, whose correspondence is so frequently quoted in Dr Burton's
'History of Scotland.' The young man was Peggy's first cousin, the
lairds of Grandholm and Stoneywood having married sisters--Mackenzie by
name. The laird of Stoneywood is known to posterity by his ingenious
achievement of ferrying the rebel army across the Dornoch Firth in small
fishing-boats collected by Stoneywood all along the coast. On the defeat
of the Pretender, and the suppression of the insurrection in 1746,
Stoneywood's estate was confiscated, and he fled to the Continent.
Family tradition adds that his escape was achieved by his disguising
himself as a miller and swimming across the Don from Stoneywood to
Grandholm, where the laird of Grandholm, who was of opposite politics,
had removed the ferry-boat, and saw but did not denounce his kinsman.
The houses of Grandholm and Stoneywood are exactly opposite each other
on the two sides of the Don. Mrs Moir of Stoneywood did not immediately
follow her husband, but remained with her friends to bring up her
children, among them Miss Peggy's lover, who, soon after his engagement
to her, joined his father on the Continent and there died.]

For those who do not know Aberdeen, it m