r
interests. His children he regarded as the enemies of his adored wife,
and consequently of himself, and his conduct to them from first to last
was little less than brutal. When the enfeebled wife at last died, the
husband's grief verged on madness.

He would not allow her body to be buried in the ordinary manner, but
caused a tomb to be erected in a wood near the house of Grandholm, where
the corpse was placed in an open coffin, and where the bereaved husband
could go daily to bewail his loss. The distracted mourner rejected all
attentions from children, relatives, or friends, yet apparently dreaded
being left alone, for he advertised for a male companion or keeper to
bear him company. The writer has often heard Dr Burton amuse himself and
his audience by describing the extraordinary varieties of struggling
humanity who applied for the situation. Ultimately, it is believed, none
of them was selected, and the laird fled from his natural home, and from
that time till his death lived chiefly in London, leaving his large
young family to take care of themselves as they best could.

The three sons went successively to India or other foreign parts, and
died there, one of them leaving a son, whose family are the present
possessors of Grandholm.

Of the seven daughters--several of whom were very handsome--two only
were married, namely, Eliza, who became Mrs Burton, mother of the
historiographer; and Margaret, who espoused rather late in life a Dr
Brown, and continued as a widow to inhabit an old house belonging to the
Grandholm family in Old Aberdeen till June 1879, when she died at the
age of ninety-eight.

The young family, thus deserted by their natural protector, fell chiefly
under the authority of his eldest daughter, Mary--said, of all his
children, to most resemble the laird himself.

Among this lady's nephews and nieces there linger strange traditions of
the violence of her temper, and of the intensity of her loves and hates.
It is hardly necessary to say that none of the females at least of the
family received any particular education.

Mary was a woman of strong natural abilities, and of an excellent
business faculty. She managed the very small resources left at her
command with consummate skill, and in her later years made of Grandholm
a hospitable, cheerful, old-fashioned home for those whom it pleased her
to receive there. Her sister Eliza's marriage had not pleased her. There
was much to justify her object