th it.
He loved port, and nuts, and porter; and so do I, but they agreed better
with my grandfather, which seems to me a breach of contract. He had
chalk-stones in his fingers; and these, in good time, I may possibly
inherit, but I would much rather have inherited his noble presence. Try
as I please, I cannot join myself on with the reverend doctor; and all
the while, no doubt, and even as I write the phrase, he moves in my
blood, and whispers words to me, and sits efficient in the very knot and
centre of my being. In his garden, as I played there, I learned the love
of mills--or had I an ancestor a miller?--and a kindness for the
neighbourhood of graves, as homely things not without their poetry--or
had I an ancestor a sexton? But what of the garden where he played
himself?--for that, too, was a scene of my education. Some part of me
played there in the eighteenth century, and ran races under the green
avenue at Pilrig; some part of me trudged up Leith Walk, which was still
a country place, and sat on the High School benches, and was thrashed,
perhaps, by Dr. Adam. The house where I spent my youth was not yet
thought upon; but we made holiday parties among the cornfields on its
site, and ate strawberries and cream near by at a gardener's. All this I
had forgotten; only my grandfather remembered and once reminded me. I
have forgotten, too, how we grew up, and took orders, and went to our
first Ayrshire parish, and fell in love with and married a daughter of
Burns's Dr. Smith--"Smith opens out his cauld harangues." I have
forgotten, but I was there all the same, and heard stories of Burns at
first hand.

And there is a thing stranger than all that; for this _homunculus_ or
part-man of mine that walked about the eighteenth century with Dr.
Balfour in his youth, was in the way of meeting other _homunculi_ or
part-men, in the persons of my other ancestors. These were of a lower
order, and doubtless we looked down upon them duly. But as I went to
college with Dr. Balfour, I may have seen the lamp and oil man taking
down the shutters from his shop beside the Tron;--we may have had a
rabbit-hutch or a bookshelf made for us by a certain carpenter in I
know not what wynd of the old smoky city; or, upon some holiday
excursion, we may have looked into the windows of a cottage in a
flower-garden and seen a certain weaver plying his shuttle. And these
were all kinsmen of mine upon the other side; and from the eyes of the
lamp and o