Old David Gregorie, who had been preparing to join the allies in Flanders, to see his cannon in use, bore his disappointment most sweetly. Perhaps Newton was right, he thought, for although he had meant to help his fellow-countrymen, the invention would soon be known to the enemy, and the Gregorie gun be levelled against his compatriots. There seems to be something almost pitiful about the end of David Gregorie’s life. Kinairdy was made over to his son, the Savilian professor at Oxford, the sweet old house forsaken, the rooms in which such merry life had been lived, deserted, and the flowers from which the gentle herbalist had drawn so many healing virtues, left to die. It would be best to think that he returned to Aberdeen at the call of King’s College, which ‘Beautified with bells within, without decked with a diadem,’ is said to ring her sons back to her before they die. But there were probably other reasons, and more potent ones. His children had to be provided for, and his wife, shrewd and not poetical (or else how could she have been a Hanoverian?) thought of all that her brother, the Provost of Aberdeen, had in his power, and she knew he could do much and would do much for her children, so they set up house once more in the old town of Aberdeen. In 1715 comes another turmoil, a flitting, almost a flight across the North Sea to Holland, to be out of the difficulties of conflicting hopes and fears, to be out of the country, to take at least no part against the Stuarts, whom we suspect Kinairdy of loving in his secret heart. Likely enough they may have offered him bribes, and a title in the coming kingdom, but there was another counsellor nearer and dearer to him, and with her and his children he sought the shelter of a foreign land. Two or three years passed before they returned to Scotland. They were content to wait till the storm was past. When they came back Gregorie’s life was nearly over. He died in 1720, an old man of ninety-five. ‘And in his story still remains A distant memory of life’s loss and gains, A starlit picture of his joy and pains.’ A visit to his widow, who was Thomas Reid’s grandmother was described by her grandson in after years in a letter to James Gregory, Professor of Medicine in Edinburgh. ‘I found her,’ he says, ‘old and bedridden, but I never saw a more ladylike woman. I was now and then called into her room, when she sat upon her bed, or entertained me to sweetmeats and grave advices. Her daughters, who visited her, as well as one who lived with her, treated her as if she had been of superior rank, and indeed her appearance and manner commanded respect. She and all her children were zealous presbyterians, the first wife’s children were Tories and Episcopalians.’