Flesh and blood had revolted at the long tasks of memorizing Scripture, Westminster Catechism, Psalms and “Baxter’s Call to the Unconverted,” set him by his parent. The leader of men was first a leader of boys, and the rebel of after years began that career by rebelling against his mother at the ripe age of ten years, leaving home and setting up on his own account in the Grampians as a hermit. An old castle perched somewhere near where the clouds seemed to touch the crags was to have been the hermitage, but a most carnal need of bread and butter and a fear of fairies induced a return. Though longing to be a hermit, young Willie had no taste for the study of polemics; but he would read till midnight, and his mother feared that “the laddie would read himself out o’ his judgment.” The first school to which he went was held in an old Roman Catholic chapel, where the former Holy Water basin was made the seat of punishment. This very small boy was early a good arithmetician and made satisfactory general progress, but he managed to find time to decorate the backs of his fellows with caricatures in chalk, and to pin papers to their coat-tails. One day he went into that sanctum, the master’s closet, put on the fool’s cap, tied himself up with the taws, and with the birch for sceptre took his seat in the holy cup. There was the usual denouement of discovery, a master boiling with rage, the taws and birch in active use, and a sorrowful small boy. The mother was extremely small in stature, brunette, and with dark brown hair which, when it turned white, remained as long and abundant as ever; her eyes were sharp and piercing, generally quiet in expression but under excitement flashed ominously. The cheek bones were high, and the small features unmistakably Celtic, the thin-lipped mouth telling of an unconquerable will which she bequeathed to her only child. The face under the broad high forehead was seldom allowed to relax into perfect placidity, the surface always showing more or less of the inward volcano; any repose there was due to religious feeling. In the son we have but a replica of the mother. She spoke Gaelic, but seldom used it; she did not reckon fairies among abolished myths, and she believed firmly in the Mackenzie death-warning which was always given by an invisible messenger. The strongest affection existed between mother and son, who lived together for the last seventeen years of the former’s life. It was but little to the credit of one of his powerful enemies that, in an effort to equal the _Advocate_, jeering remarks upon Mackenzie’s aged mother were made in the public press. But so it was; and he was advised to mend his ways as an editor, if he expected to continue to support his mother and family. The inference, as his biographer gives it, is that it was not praiseworthy to support an aged mother. It drew from the son the boast that if he could keep his old mother, his wife and his family, and avoid debt, he cared not for wealth.