sleepin'!" while he cautions the grieve, "Now mind that black park; it
never gied me onything, ne'er gie onything to it."

In the days when the Dean knew that Water-side the fortalice was
uninhabited, and I think not habitable for gentlefolks; but down on the
haugh below, and close to the river in a pretty garden-cottage, dwelt
the old Lady Tilquhillie, with her son the sheriff of the county, George
Douglas, whom a few Edinburgh men may yet remember as the man of wit and
pleasure about town, the _beau_ of the Parliament House--at home a kind
hospitable gentleman, looking down a little upon the rough humours that
pleased his neighbours. The old lady--I think she was a Dutch woman, or
from the Cape of Good Hope--and her old servant, Sandy M'Canch,
furnished the Dean with many a bit of Deeside life and humour; and are
they not written in the _Reminiscences!_

Higher up the river were two houses where the Dean was much
beloved--Banchory Lodge, his uncle General Burnett's, where also lived
his dear aunt, the widowed Mrs. Forbes; and Blackhall, where, in the
time I have in my mind, lived his aunt, Mrs. Russell, the widow of my
uncle Francis Russell, a woman of many sorrows, but whose sweet voice
and silver laugh brought joy into the house even amidst sickness and
sorrow[8]. She had not the Deeside language, but she and her sister Lady
Ramsay, Yorkshire women, and educated in the city of York, helped to
give the Dean that curious northern English talk which he mixed
pleasantly with the language of Angus and Mearns that he loved so well;
and he inherited from the Bannermans the sweet voice, so valuable an
inheritance to a preacher.

I have gone over less than a dozen miles of the valley of the Dee, which
was the Dean's Deeside. I think the manners and popular thought, as well