to college. Nothing of all this would cross the mind of the young
student, as he posted up the Bridges with trim, stockinged legs, in
that city of cocked hats and good Scotch still unadulterated. It
would not cross his mind that he should have a daughter; and the
lamp and oil man, just then beginning, by a not unnatural
metastasis, to bloom into a lighthouse-engineer, should have a
grandson; and that these two, in the fulness of time, should wed;
and some portion of that student himself should survive yet a year
or two longer in the person of their child.

But our ancestral adventures are beyond even the arithmetic of
fancy; and it is the chief recommendation of long pedigrees, that
we can follow backward the careers of our HOMUNCULOS and be
reminded of our antenatal lives. Our conscious years are but a
moment in the history of the elements that build us. Are you a
bank-clerk, and do you live at Peckham? It was not always so. And
though to-day I am only a man of letters, either tradition errs or
I was present when there landed at St. Andrews a French barber-
surgeon, to tend the health and the beard of the great Cardinal
Beaton; I have shaken a spear in the Debateable Land and shouted
the slogan of the Elliots; I was present when a skipper, plying
from Dundee, smuggled Jacobites to France after the '15; I was in a
West India merchant's office, perhaps next door to Bailie Nicol
Jarvie's, and managed the business of a plantation in St. Kitt's; I
was with my engineer-grandfather (the son-in-law of the lamp and
oil man) when he sailed north about Scotland on the famous cruise
that gave us the PIRATE and the LORD OF THE ISLES; I was with him,
too, on the Bell Rock, in the fog, when the SMEATON had drifted
from her moorings, and the Aberdeen men, pick in hand, had seized
upon the only boats, and he must stoop and lap sea-water before his