This was strikingly exemplified on the occasion of Colonel Wauchope's marriage in 1893 to Miss Jean Muir, the daughter of the venerable Principal of Edinburgh University. On the Saturday previous, the villagers and others turned out in full force, and by their gifts as well as by their presence showed how gratified they were with the lady of his choice, and how their good wishes went out towards them both. Two bands headed the procession to the mansion-house, and when the lawn was reached the Colonel was presented in name of them all with a silver punch-bowl, on a polished cannel-coal stand taken from the Niddrie coal-pits. The presents from the school children, the tenants on the estate, and other incidents of the day testified unmistakably in the same way to the cordial relations subsisting between the laird and his neighbours and dependants. 'A better man never lived' was the terse estimate of one of the villagers when speaking of him lately, and the echo of it will long keep his memory green. {135} [Sidenote: Charlie Egan] One touching incident illustrating his goodness of heart is told by the Rev. George Dodds, the Free Church Minister of Liberton, as occurring about this time. When in command at Maryhill Barracks the Colonel one day inspecting the hospital had his attention directed to a boy--one of two brothers in the band of the Black Watch--who was dying of consumption, and it touched the soldier's heart. Finding out that the boy was an orphan, he had him removed to a room in his own house, the Colonel himself accompanying the lad from Glasgow to Niddrie, where every possible attention was paid to him. Dr. A. Balfour of Portobello was asked to look after the case, and it was the Colonel's wish that a nurse should attend him. The lad, however, got so attached to the housekeeper at Niddrie--one of the kindest and most faithful of servants--that he would have no other attention than hers. During all the illness of the brave little chap, no one knows but the kindly nurse, the doctor, and the minister, the Colonel's tenderness and anxiety and unstinted generosity towards his little friend. When at length after some weeks he died, it was a sight not to be forgotten, how at the close of the funeral service he stood weeping at the head of the coffin which was laid on trestles in the hall. It was a stormy wintry day at the end of April, the snow lying thick on the ground; but, following the bier, he walked uncovered through the snow with all the reverence of a bereaved man to the grave in the little private burying-ground in the Niddrie policies, where the young soldier, whose closing weeks of life he had soothed so tenderly, was laid to rest by his comrades from Edinburgh Castle.