‘But you must pardon me if I say that the boy’s pronunciation is the usual one. Have you a pronouncing dictionary?’ ‘Dictionary! O yes. Charlie, rin round to the house and fetch me the big dictionary. Meantime, John, go on wi’ the reading.’ So John went on with ‘bull,’ and Charlie brought the dictionary, which the master turned up in triumph, ‘There, sir, is the word with the mark above the _u_, and there are the words that it’s to be sounded like--put, push, pull (pronouncing these all like but, brush, dull). And now, John, you will go on wi’ _bull_.’ The questions put by the examiners are not always judicious. The man who asked ‘If Alfred the Great were alive now, what part of our political system would he be likely to take most interest in?’ need not have been surprised to receive the answer, ‘Please sir, if Alfred the Great were alive now, I think he’d be so old he wouldn’t take interest in anything.’ The difference between the pronunciation of Latin on the two sides of the Tweed used to give rise to curious confusion, whether we ‘gave up Cicero to C or K.’ I remember a boy who had previously attended a grammar school in Yorkshire and had come to the Edinburgh High School, being called on to read the introductory lines of the first book of Ovid’s _Metamorphoses_. He began pronouncing in the English way, ‘Ante mare et tellus.’ ‘What, what do you say?’ interrupted Dr. Boyd, ‘Aunty Mary,’ forsooth! ‘I suppose we shall have Uncle Robert next.’ CHAPTER VII. Old and new type of landed proprietors in Scotland. Highland Chiefs--Second Marquess of Breadalbane; late Duke of Argyll. Ayrshire Lairds--T. F. Kennedy of Dunure; ‘Sliddery Braes’; Smith of Auchengree. Fingask and Charles Martin. New lairds of wealth.