From Aleck Robertson's earliest infancy he had been bred to the mill, as his father had been by his father before him. It is a small, compact building, off the Falls Road, the Robertson mill is, harboring not more than four hundred employees. But their fame is not in Belfast alone. Many the royal house in Europe before the war had its bride's linen from the Robertson factory. It is a small mill, as it should be, with a small door, and on a by-street is the lintel with the name "Robert Robertson & His Son, Founded 1803." A queer family, these Robertsons of Belfast, very solid, very stubborn. In five generations there has been but one son to the family, and no daughters. "The Scottish weaver-bird, laying but one egg," some dry doctor dubbed them. So they be. They are a tall, solid dynasty, marrying toward middle age a bride solid as themselves. Young Aleck, red-bearded and rangy, could remember his father, as tall and rangy as he, and bearded, too, as his grandfather was, both silent, speculative men, students of the Shorter Catechism, and shrewd observers of life, possessors of the trust of glossy linen. They had their duties: to mind their own business; to take care of the mill, and to make fine cloth. "They can see the linen in the flax, they Robertsons!" a workman of theirs once boasted, and it was true. At Portrush golf-club you may hear about him. "The championship of Ireland," they tell me, "Captain Macneill got it then and he held it for three years and then your Uncle Simon for a year, and then Mr. Campbell o' Kilkee, and then--who was it, then?--the linen man of Belfast--what the deuce is his name? Robson? Robinson? Robertson, that's it! You'd hardly remember him; he was not a showy player, not an affable man, but sound! Ah, damned sound!" At his school they have difficulty in recalling him. The president remembers him vaguely as a solemn youth with freckles and gigantic hands.