of Tower Hill. And at such times my
father almost ran as he passed the door of the infant school and thought
of the follies which were being committed within.

"Samplers," he was wont to mutter, "samplers--when they might be at
their Ovid!"

My mother--Gracie Lyon that was--had none of the stern blood of her
Cameronian forebears, nor yet my father's tempestuous Norland mood. She
was gentle, patient, with little to say for herself--like Leah,
tender-eyed (in the English, not in the Hebrew sense)--and I remember
well that as a child one of my great pleasures was to stroke her cheek
as she was putting me to sleep, saying, "Mother, how soft your skin is.
It is like velvet!"

"Aye," she would answer, with a sigh gentle as herself, "so they used to
tell me!"

And I somehow knew that "they" excluded my father, but whom it included
I did not know then nor for many a day after.

But my grandmother, my mother's mother--ah, there indeed you were in a
different world! She dwelt in a large house on the edge of the Marnhoul
woods. My grandfather had the lease of the farm of Heathknowes, with
little arable land, but a great hill behind it on which fed black-faced
sheep, sundry cattle in the "low parks," and by the river a strip of
corn land sufficient for the meal-ark and the stable feeding of his four
stout horses. Also on my father's behalf my uncles conducted the lonely
saw-mill that ate and ate into the Great Wood and yet never got any
farther. There might be seen machinery for making spools--with
water-driven lathes, which turned these articles, variously known as
"bobbins" and "pirns," literally off the reel by the thousand. It was a
sweet, birch-smelling place and my favourite haunt on all holidays.
William Lyon, my grandfather, had had a tempestuous youth, from which,
as he said, he had been saved "by the grace of God and Mary Lyon."

"Many a sore day she had with me," he would confess to me, for he took
pleasure in my society, "but got me buckled down at last!"

As my grandmother also kept me in the most affectionate but complete
subjection, the fact that neither one nor the other of us dared disobey
"Mary Lyon" was a sort of bond between us. Yet my grandmother was not a
very tall nor yet to the outward eye a powerful woman. You had to look
her in the eye to know. But there you saw a flash that would have cowed
a grenadier. There was something masterful and even martial in her walk,
in the way she attacked the enemy o