conducted all conventional arrangements with a certain grandeur and
dignity of air, and "absolutely loved a funeral." "He seemed to
preserve the list of a whole bead-roll of cousins merely for the
pleasure of being at their funerals, which he was often asked to
superintend, and I suspect had sometimes to pay for. He carried me
with him as often as he could to these mortuary ceremonies; but
feeling I was not, like him, either useful or ornamental, I escaped as
often as I could." This strong dash of the conventional in Scott's
father, this satisfaction in seeing people fairly to the door of life,
and taking his final leave of them there, with something of a
ceremonious flourish of observance, was, however, combined with a
much nobler and deeper kind of orderliness. Sir Walter used to say
that his father had lost no small part of a very flourishing business,
by insisting that his clients should do their duty to their own people
better than they were themselves at all inclined to do it. And of this
generous strictness in sacrificing his own interests to his sympathy
for others, the son had as much as the father.

Sir Walter's mother, who was a Miss Rutherford, the daughter of a
physician, had been better educated than most Scotchwomen of her day,
in spite of having been sent "to be finished off" by "the honourable
Mrs. Ogilvie," whose training was so effective, in one direction at
least, that even in her eightieth year Mrs. Scott could not enjoy a
comfortable rest in her chair, but "took as much care to avoid
touching her chair with her back, as if she had still been under the
stern eyes of Mrs. Ogilvie." None the less Mrs. Scott was a motherly,
comfortable woman, with much tenderness of heart, and a well-stored,
vivid memory. Sir Walter, writing of her, after his mother's death, to
Lady Louisa Stewart, says, "She had a mind peculiarly well stored with
much acquired information and natural talent, and as she was very old,