III. THE BANKS OF TAY 63

deep of sombre crystal, round the steps where the servants dipped their pails.¹

70. A mistaken correspondent in Fors once complained of my coarse habit of sneering at people of no ancestry.² I have no such habit; though not always entirely at ease in writing of my uncles the baker and the tanner. And my readers may trust me when I tell them that, in now remembering my dreams in the house of the entirely honest chief baker of Market Street, Croydon, and of Peter-not Simon-the tanner,³ whose house was by the riverside of Perth, I would not change the dreams, far less the tender realities, of those early days, for anything I hear now remembered by lords or dames, of their days of childhood in castle halls, and by sweet lawns and lakes in park-walled forest.

Lawn and lake enough indeed I had, in the North Inch of Perth, and pools of pausing Tay, before Rose Terrace, (where I used to live after my uncle died, briefly apoplectic, at Bridge-End,) in the peace of the fair Scotch summer days, with my widowed aunt, and my little cousin Jessie, then traversing a bright space between her sixth and ninth year; dark-eyed deeply,* like her mother, and similarly pious; so that she and I used to compete in the Sunday evening Scriptural examinations; and be as proud as two little peacocks because Jessie’s elder brothers, and sister Mary, used to get “put down,” and either Jessie or I was always “Dux.” We agreed upon this that we would be married when we were a little older; not considering it to be preparatorily necessary to be in any degree wiser.

71. Strangely, the kitchen servant-of-all-work⁴ in the house at Rose Terrace was a very old “Mause,”-before,

* As opposed to the darkness of mere iris, making the eyes like black cherries.

¹ [Compare above, § 4, p. 15.]

² [See Letters 57 and 63 (Vol. XXVIII. pp. 457, 547.]

³ [Acts ix. 43.]

⁴ [For other references to this old servant, see below, pp. 70, 123, 465, 595.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]