boyhood, and after he was full of years and honours her presence was
the same shelter to him as it was when a boy. His friends often spoke
of the beautiful affection and worship with which he cherished her.
One who knew him well for the last thirty years of his life, and was
very probably at one time a boarder in his house, the clever and
bustling Earl of Buchan, elder brother of Lord Chancellor Erskine,
says the principal avenue to Smith's heart always was by his mother.
He was a delicate child, and afflicted even in childhood with those
fits of absence and that habit of speaking to himself which he carried
all through life. Of his infancy only one incident has come down to
us. In his fourth year, while on a visit to his grandfather's house at
Strathendry on the banks of the Leven, the child was stolen by a
passing band of gipsies, and for a time could not be found. But
presently a gentleman arrived who had met a gipsy woman a few miles
down the road carrying a child that was crying piteously. Scouts were
immediately despatched in the direction indicated, and they came upon
the woman in Leslie wood. As soon as she saw them she threw her burden
down and escaped, and the child was brought back to his mother. He
would have made, I fear, a poor gipsy. As he grew up in boyhood his
health became stronger, and he was in due time sent to the Burgh
School of Kirkcaldy.

The Burgh School of Kirkcaldy was one of the best secondary schools of
Scotland at that period, and its principal master, Mr. David Millar,
had the name of being one of the best schoolmasters of his day. When
Smith first went to school we cannot say, but it seems probable that
he began Latin in 1733, for _Eutropius_ is the class-book of a
beginner in Latin, and the _Eutropius_ which Smith used as a
class-book still exists, and contains his signature with the date of
that year.[3] As he left school in 1737, he thus had at least four