_ Alex. Adam,
also, who, himself a loving historian, remembered the fate of every boy
at his school during the fifty years he had headed it, and whose last
words--"It grows dark, the boys may dismiss," gave to Scott's heart the
vision and the audit of the death of Elspeth of the Craigburn-foot.

Strangely, in opening the old volume at this moment (I would not give it
for an illuminated missal) I find, in its article on Prosody, some
things extremely useful to me, which I have been hunting for in vain
through Zumpt and Matthiae. In all rational respects I believe it to be
the best Latin Grammar that has yet been written.

When my mother had carried me through it as far as the syntax, it was
thought desirable that I should be put under a master: and the master
chosen was a deeply and deservedly honored clergyman, the Rev. Thomas
Dale, mentioned in Mr. Holbeach's article, "The New Fiction,"
(_Contemporary Review_ for February of this year), together with Mr.
Melville, who was our pastor after Mr. Dale went to St. Pancras.

95. On the first day when I went to take my seat in Mr. Dale's
schoolroom, I carried my old grammar to him, in a modest pride,
expecting some encouragement and honor for the accuracy with which I
could repeat, on demand, some hundred and sixty close-printed pages of
it.

But Mr. Dale threw it back to me with a fierce bang upon his desk,
saying (with accent and look of seven-times-heated scorn), "That's a
_Scotch_ thing."

Now, my father being Scotch, and an Edinburgh High School boy, and my
mother having labored in that book with me since I could read, and all
my happiest holiday time having been spent on the North Inch of Perth,
these four words, with the action accompanying them, contained as much
insult, pain, and loosening of my respect for my parents, love of my
father's country, and honor for its worthies, as it was possible to
compress into four syllables and an ill-mannered gesture. Which were
therefore pure, double-edged and point-envenomed blasphemy. For to make
a boy despise his mother's care, is the straightest way to make him also
despise his Redeemer's voice; and to make him scorn his father and his
father's house, the straightest way to make him deny his God, and his
God's Heaven.

96. I speak, observe, in this instance, only of the actual words and
their effect; not of the feeling in the speaker's mind, which was almost
playful, though his words, tainted with extremity of pride, we