"For course of blood, our proverbs dream, Is warmer than the mountain stream. And thus my Christmas still I hold Where my great-grandsire came of old, [54] 'With amber beard and flaxen hair, And reverend apostolic air, The feast and holytide to share, And mix sobriety with wine, And honest mirth with thoughts divine.' Small thought was his, in after-time, E'er to be hitched into a rhyme. The simple sire could only boast That he was loyal to his cost, The banished race of kings revered, And lost his land--but kept his beard,--" "a mark of attachment," Scott adds in his note, "which I suppose had been common during Cromwell's usurpation; for in Cowley's 'Cutter of Coleman Street' one drunken cavalier upbraids another that when he was not able to pay a barber, he affected to 'wear a beard for the King.'" Observe, here, that you must always be on your guard, in reading Scott's notes or private letters, against his way of kindly laughing at what he honours more deeply than he likes to confess. The house in which Beardie died was still standing when Sir Walter wrote his autobiography, (1808), at the north-east entrance of the churchyard of Kelso. He left three sons. Any that remain of the family of the elder are long since settled in America (male heirs extinct). James Scott, well known in India as one of the original settlers of Prince of Wales Island, was a son of the youngest, who died at Lasswade, in Midlothian (first mention of Scott's Lasswade). But of the second son, Scott's grandfather, we have to learn much. V. Robert Scott of Sandy-Knowe, second son of Beardie. I cannot shorten Scott's own account of the circumstances which determined his choice of life.