the stately buildings, the broad prospects, and those narrow and crowded

lanes of the old town where my ancestors had lived and died in the days

before Columbus.

But there was another curiosity that interested me more deeply--my

grandfather, Alexander Loudon. In his time, the old gentleman had been a

working mason, and had risen from the ranks more, I think, by shrewdness

than by merit. In his appearance, speech, and manners, he bore broad

marks of his origin, which were gall and wormwood to my Uncle Adam.

His nails, in spite of anxious supervision, were often in conspicuous

mourning; his clothes hung about him in bags and wrinkles like a

ploughman's Sunday coat; his accent was rude, broad, and dragging: take

him at his best, and even when he could be induced to hold his tongue,

his mere presence in a corner of the drawing-room, with his open-air

wrinkles, his scanty hair, his battered hands, and the cheerful

craftiness of his expression, advertised the whole gang of us for a

self-made family. My aunt might mince and my cousins bridle; but there

was no getting over the solid, physical fact of the stonemason in the

chimney-corner.

That is one advantage of being an American: it never occurred to me to

be ashamed of my grandfather, and the old gentleman was quick to mark

the difference. He held my mother in tender memory, perhaps because

he was in the habit of daily contrasting her with Uncle Adam, whom he

detested to the point of frenzy; and he set down to inheritance from

his favourite my own becoming treatment of himself. On our walks abroad,

which soon became daily, he would sometimes (after duly warning me

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