friends wrote a word to us. With regard to mine it was not to he
wondered at much--she was only 13--but the other was more surprising.
It was not till 1865 that an old woman told me that when Miss F. B.
came to return some books and music to her to give to my aunt in
Melrose, "she just sat in the chair and cried as if her heart would
break." She was not quite a free agent. Very few single women were free
agents in 1839. We were hopelessly ruined, our place would know us no
more.

The only long holidays I had in the year I spent at Thornton Loch, in
East Lothian, 40 miles away. I did not know that my father was a heavy
speculator in foreign wheat, and I thought his keen interest in the
market in Mark lane was on account of the Thornton Loch crops, in which
first my grandfather and afterwards the three Maiden aunts were deeply
concerned. My mother's father, John Brodie, was one of the most
enterprising agriculturists in the most advanced district of Great
Britain. He won a prize of two silver salvers from the Highland
Society for having the largest area of drilled wheat sown. He was
called up twice to London to give evidence before Parliamentary
committees on the corn laws, and he naturally approved of them,
because, with three large farms held on 19 years' leases at war prices,
the influx of cheap wheat from abroad would mean ruin. He proved that
he paid 6,000 pounds a year for these three farms--two he worked himself,
the third was for his eldest son; but he was liable for the rent. On
his first London trip, my aunt Margaret accompanied him, and on his
second he took my mother. That was in the year 1814, and both of them
noted from the postchaise that farming was not up to what was done in
East Lothian.

My grandfather Brodie was a speculating man, and he lost nearly all his