should be "tower."]

The tomb of The Bruce is in the center of the Abbey, Saint Margaret's
tomb is near, and many of the "royal folk" lie sleeping close around.
Fortunate, indeed, the child who first sees the light in that romantic
town, which occupies high ground three miles north of the Firth of
Forth, overlooking the sea, with Edinburgh in sight to the south, and
to the north the peaks of the Ochils clearly in view. All is still
redolent of the mighty past when Dunfermline was both nationally and
religiously the capital of Scotland.

The child privileged to develop amid such surroundings absorbs poetry
and romance with the air he breathes, assimilates history and
tradition as he gazes around. These become to him his real world in
childhood--the ideal is the ever-present real. The actual has yet to
come when, later in life, he is launched into the workaday world of
stern reality. Even then, and till his last day, the early impressions
remain, sometimes for short seasons disappearing perchance, but only
apparently driven away or suppressed. They are always rising and
coming again to the front to exert their influence, to elevate his
thought and color his life. No bright child of Dunfermline can escape
the influence of the Abbey, Palace, and Glen. These touch him and set
fire to the latent spark within, making him something different and
beyond what, less happily born, he would have become. Under these
inspiring conditions my parents had also been born, and hence came, I
doubt not, the potency of the romantic and poetic strain which
pervaded both.

As my father succeeded in the weaving business we removed from Moodie
Street to a much more commodious house in Reid's Park. My father's