read elsewhere concerning her confirms the truth of
the portrait. Williamson says that

the lady to whom he (Thomas Watt) was early united in marriage
was Miss Agnes Muirhead, a gentlewoman of good understanding and
superior endowments, whose excellent management in household
affairs would seem to have contributed much to the order of her
establishment, as well as to the every-day happiness of a
cheerful home. She is described as having been a person above
common in many respects, of a fine womanly presence, ladylike in
appearance, affecting in domestic arrangements--according to our
traditions--what, it would seem was considered for the time,
rather a superior style of living. What such a style consisted
in, the reader shall have the means of judging for himself. One
of the author's informants on such points more than twenty years
ago, a venerable lady, then in her eighty-fifth year, was wont
to speak of the worthy Bailie's wife with much characteristic
interest and animation. As illustrative of what has just been
remarked of the internal economy of the family, the old lady
related an occasion on which she had spent an evening, when a
girl, at Mrs. Watt's house, and remembered expressing with much
_naivete_ to her mother, on returning home, her childish
surprise that "Mrs. Watt had _two_ candles lighted on the
table!" Among these and other reminiscences of her youth, one
venerable informant described James Watt's mother, in her
eloquent and expressive Doric, as, "a braw, braw, woman--none
now to be seen like her."

There is another account from a neighbor, who also refers to Mrs. Watt
as being somewhat of the grand lady, but always so kind, so sweet, so
helpful to all her neighbors.

The Watt family for generations steadily improved and developed. A great
step upward was made the day Agnes Muirhead was captured. We are liable
to forget how little of the original strain of an old family remains in
after days. We glance over the record of the Cecils, for instance, to
find that the present Marquis has less than one four-thousandth part of
the Cecil blood; a dozen marriages have each reduced it one-half, and
the recent restoration of the family to its pristine greatness in the
person of the late Prime Minister, and in his son, the brilliant young
Parliamentarian, of whom great things are predicted already, is to be
credited