So much for the male branch of the family tree, but this is only half. What of that of the grandmothers and mothers of the line--equally important? For what a Scotch boy born to labor is to become, and how, cannot be forecast until we know what his mother is, who is to him nurse, servant, governess, teacher and saint, all in one. We must look to the Watt women as carefully as to the men; and these fortunately we find all that can be desired. His mother was Agnes Muirhead, a descendant of the Muirheads of Lachop, who date away back before the reign of King David, 1122. Scott, in his "Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border," gives us the old ballad of "The Laird of Muirhead," who played a great part in these unsettled days. The good judgment which characterised the Watts for three generations is nowhere more clearly shown than in the lady James Watt's father courted and finally succeeded in securing for his wife. She is described as a gentlewoman of reserved and quiet deportment, "esteemed by her neighbours for graces of person as well as of mind and heart, and not less distinguished for her sound sense and good manners than for her cheerful temper and excellent housewifery." Her likeness is thus drawn, and all that we have read elsewhere concerning her confirms the truth of the portrait. Williamson says that the lady to whom he (Thomas Watt) was early united in marriage was Miss Agnes Muirhead, a gentlewoman of good understanding and superior endowments, whose excellent management in household affairs would seem to have contributed much to the order of her establishment, as well as to the every-day happiness of a cheerful home. She is described as having been a person above common in many respects, of a fine womanly presence, ladylike in appearance, affecting in domestic arrangements--according to our traditions--what, it would seem was considered for the time, rather a superior style of living. What such a style consisted in, the reader shall have the means of judging for himself. One of the author's informants on such points more than twenty years ago, a venerable lady, then in her eighty-fifth year, was wont to speak of the worthy Bailie's wife with much characteristic interest and animation. As illustrative of what has just been remarked of the internal economy of the family, the old lady related an occasion on which she had spent an evening, when a girl, at Mrs. Watt's house, and remembered expressing with much _naivete_ to her mother, on returning home, her childish surprise that "Mrs. Watt had _two_ candles lighted on the table!" Among these and other reminiscences of her youth, one venerable informant described James Watt's mother, in her eloquent and expressive Doric, as, "a braw, braw, woman--none now to be seen like her."