At Edinburgh there is a railroad station instead of the North Loch; the water of Leith is--well, one cannot say in civilized company what it is; [75] and at Linlithgow, of all the palaces so fair,--built for a royal dwelling, etc.,--the oil, (paraffin,) floating on the streams, can be ignited, burning with a large flame. [76] My good Scottish friends, had you not better leave off pleasing yourselves with descriptions of your rivers as they were, and consider what your rivers are to be? For I correct my derivation of Clarty Hole too sorrowfully. [77] It is the Ford that is clarty now--not the Hole. To return to our sentimental work, however, for a while. I left in my last letter one or two of the most interesting points in the first year at Sandy-Knowe unnoticed, because I thought it best to give you, by comparison with each other, some idea of the three women who, as far as education could do it, formed the mind of Scott. His masters only polished and directed it. His mother, grandmother, and aunt welded the steel. Hear first this of his mother. (Lockhart, vol. i., p. 78.) "She had received, as became the daughter of an eminently learned physician, the best sort of education then bestowed on young gentlewomen in Scotland." The poet, speaking of Mrs. Euphemia Sinclair, the mistress of the school at which his mother was reared, to the ingenious local antiquary, Mr. Robert Chambers, said that "she must have been possessed of uncommon talents for education, as all her young ladies were, in after-life, fond of reading, wrote and spelled admirably, were well acquainted with history and the belles lettres, without neglecting the more homely duties of the needle and accompt-book, and perfectly well-bred in society." Mr. Chambers adds, "Sir Walter further communicated that his mother, and many others of Mrs. Sinclair's pupils, were sent afterwards to be finished off by the Honourable Mrs. Ogilvie, a lady who trained her young friends to a style of manners which would now be considered intolerably stiff. Such was the effect of this early training upon the mind of Mrs. Scott, that even when she approached her eightieth year, she took as much care to avoid touching her chair with her back, as if she had still been under the stern eye of Mrs. Ogilvie." You are to note in this extract three things. First, the singular influence of education, given by a master or mistress of real power. "All her young ladies" (all, Sir Walter! do you verily mean this?) "fond of reading," and so forth.