[54] Some of her neighbours thought her stately and unbending, and that she affected a superior style of living. In the ‘Memorials of Watt,’ by the late George Williamson, Esq., Greenock, are to be found many curious and interesting details as to the Watt family; collected partly from tradition and partly from local records. Of Mrs. Watt’s “superior style of living,” compared with the custom of the period, the following anecdote is given:--“One of the author’s informants on such points, a venerable lady in her eightieth year, was wont to speak of the worthy baillie’s wife with much characteristic interest and animation. As illustrative 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 naïveté to her mother on returning home, her childish surprise that ‘Mrs. Watt had _two_ lighted candles on the table.’ Among these and other reminiscences of her youth, our venerable informant described James Watt’s mother, in her expressive Doric, as ‘a braw, braw woman--none now to be seen like her.’” p. 128–9. [Illustration: JAMES WATT TAVERN, GREENOCK. [By R. P. Leitch.]] From his earliest years James Watt was of an extremely fragile constitution, requiring the tenderest nurture. Struggling as it were for life all through his childhood, he acquired an almost feminine delicacy and sensitiveness, which made him shrink from the rough play of robust children; and hence, during his early years, his education was entirely conducted at home. His mother taught him reading, and his father a little writing and arithmetic. His mother, to amuse him, encouraged him to draw with a pencil on paper, or with chalk upon the floor; and his father supplied him with a few tools from the carpenter’s shop, which he soon learnt to handle with expertness. In such occupations he found the best resource against _ennui_. He took his toys to pieces, and out of the parts ingeniously constructed new ones. The mechanical dexterity which he thus cultivated even as a child was probably in a great measure the foundation upon which he built the speculations to which he owes his glory; nor, without his early mechanical training, is there reason to believe that he would afterwards become the improver and almost the creator of the steam-engine.