Jenkin, lived with them until her death; she had all the Jenkin
beauty of countenance, though she was unhappily deformed in body
and of frail health; and she even excelled her gentle and
ineffectual family in all amiable qualities. So that each of the
two races from which Fleeming sprang, had an outpost by his very
cradle; the one he instinctively loved, the other hated; and the
life-long war in his members had begun thus early by a victory for
what was best.

We can trace the family from one country place to another in the
south of Scotland; where the child learned his taste for sport by
riding home the pony from the moors. Before he was nine he could
write such a passage as this about a Hallowe'en observance: 'I
pulled a middling-sized cabbage-runt with a pretty sum of gold
about it. No witches would run after me when I was sowing my
hempseed this year; my nuts blazed away together very comfortably
to the end of their lives, and when mamma put hers in which were
meant for herself and papa they blazed away in the like manner.'
Before he was ten he could write, with a really irritating
precocity, that he had been 'making some pictures from a book
called "Les Francais peints par euxmemes." . . . It is full of
pictures of all classes, with a description of each in French. The
pictures are a little caricatured, but not much.' Doubtless this
was only an echo from his mother, but it shows the atmosphere in
which he breathed. It must have been a good change for this art
critic to be the playmate of Mary Macdonald, their gardener's
daughter at Barjarg, and to sup with her family on potatoes and
milk; and Fleeming himself attached some value to this early and
friendly experience of another class.