ll had shrunk. Here was a
city of the Lilliputians. I could almost touch the eaves of the house
in which I was born, and the sea--to walk to which on a Saturday had
been considered quite a feat--was only three miles distant. The rocks
at the seashore, among which I had gathered wilks (whelks) seemed to
have vanished, and a tame flat shoal remained. The schoolhouse, around
which had centered many of my schoolboy recollections--my only Alma
Mater--and the playground, upon which mimic battles had been fought
and races run, had shrunk into ridiculously small dimensions. The fine
residences, Broomhall, Fordell, and especially the conservatories at
Donibristle, fell one after the other into the petty and
insignificant. What I felt on a later occasion on a visit to Japan,
with its small toy houses, was something like a repetition of the
impression my old home made upon me.

Everything was there in miniature. Even the old well at the head of
Moodie Street, where I began my early struggles, was changed from what
I had pictured it. But one object remained all that I had dreamed of
it. There was no disappointment in the glorious old Abbey and its
Glen. It was big enough and grand enough, and the memorable carved
letters on the top of the tower--"King Robert The Bruce"--filled my
eye and my heart as fully as of old. Nor was the Abbey bell
disappointing, when I heard it for the first time after my return. For
this I was grateful. It gave me a rallying point, and around the old
Abbey, with its Palace ruins and the Glen, other objects adjusted
themselves in their true proportions after a time.

My relatives were exceedingly kind, and the oldest of all, my dear old
Auntie Charlotte, in a moment of exultation exclaimed:

"Oh, you will just be coming back here some day and _keep a shop in
the High Street_."

To keep a shop in the High Street was her idea of triumph. Her
son-in-law and daughter, both my full cousins, though unrelated to
each other, had risen to this sublime height, and nothing was too
great to predict for her promising nephew. There is an aristocracy
even in shopkeeping, and the family of the green grocer of the High
Street mingles not upon equal terms with him of Moodie Street.

Auntie, who had often played my nurse, liked to dwell upon the fact
that I was a screaming infant that had to be fed with two spoons, as I
yelled whenever one left my mouth. Captain Jones, our superintendent
of the steel works at a later da