"the hat and the stick" which Scott gave his. How
wonderful is the influence of a hero upon children!

I spent many hours and evenings in the High Street with my uncle and
"Dod," and thus began a lifelong brotherly alliance between the latter
and myself. "Dod" and "Naig" we always were in the family. I could not
say "George" in infancy and he could not get more than "Naig" out of
Carnegie, and it has always been "Dod" and "Naig" with us. No other
names would mean anything.

There were two roads by which to return from my uncle's house in the
High Street to my home in Moodie Street at the foot of the town, one
along the eerie churchyard of the Abbey among the dead, where there
was no light; and the other along the lighted streets by way of the
May Gate. When it became necessary for me to go home, my uncle, with a
wicked pleasure, would ask which way I was going. Thinking what
Wallace would do, I always replied I was going by the Abbey. I have
the satisfaction of believing that never, not even upon one occasion,
did I yield to the temptation to take the other turn and follow the
lamps at the junction of the May Gate. I often passed along that
churchyard and through the dark arch of the Abbey with my heart in my
mouth. Trying to whistle and keep up my courage, I would plod through
the darkness, falling back in all emergencies upon the thought of what
Wallace would have done if he had met with any foe, natural or
supernatural.

King Robert the Bruce never got justice from my cousin or myself in
childhood. It was enough for us that he was a king while Wallace was
the man of the people. Sir John Graham was our second. The intensity
of a Scottish boy's patriotism, reared as I was, constitutes a real
force in his life to the very end. If the source of my stock of that
prime article--courage--were studied, I am sure the final analysis
would find it founded upon Wallace, the hero of Scotland. It is a
tower of strength for a boy to have a hero.

It gave me a pang to find when I reached America that there was any
other country which pretended to have anything to be proud of. What
was a country without Wallace, Bruce, and Burns? I find in the
untraveled Scotsman of to-day something still of this feeling. It
remains for maturer years and wider knowledge to tell us that every
nation has its heroes, its romance, its traditions, and its
achievements; and while the true Scotsman will not find reason in
after years to lower the estim