After her husband’s sudden death[5] Mrs James Gregorie returned to Aberdeen. She did not wish to live in Edinburgh, which was now so full of sad memories for her, and in the streets of which she had not had time to become more than a wayfarer. She had shared Professor Gregorie’s brilliant popularity, but the round of gaiety had brought them intimate acquaintances rather than friends, and in her desolation her heart turned to the home of her childhood, and back to the more kindly north she took her three children, her two little girls and James about whom this chapter is written. Thus it came that this boy was brought up, like the generation before him, at the Grammar School of Aberdeen. Footnote 5: Professor James Gregorie. _Cf._ Chapter III. It was a good school, and did much for its boys, beating education into them if they would not have it otherwise, and of such discipline little Gregorie, who was no exception to the fiery family temper, no doubt had his share. He passed from school to Aberdeen University and later to Edinburgh, but when he inclined to become a doctor, it was decided that he should go abroad and get a French degree, an arrangement to which he acceded with joy, and in 1696 at the age of twenty-two he set out for a time on the continent. Once away from home, with no one to consider but himself, he turned to what was really the centre of greatest interest in Flanders—the camp of William III. Merry were the days he passed there and full of excitement, so that perhaps there was one person who was only half glad when the Peace of Ryswick brought the war in Flanders to an end. But it was better for his work that he should go further afield. On therefore he went, lingering first at Utrecht, then at Paris before he reached Rheims, where he secured his degree in September 1698. How much study Gregorie put into these years it is impossible to ascertain. Medicine, and more especially surgery, were pretty barbaric arts in those days, but this student, it should be remembered, was always a Gregorie, and could not but learn. Just before he came back to England he spent a few weeks in the French camp, and after this he accepted an invitation to take a practice at Chelmsford, Essex. But alas! James Gregorie found that he could not settle down to a country life, and so to the regret of his patients he took a hurried farewell of them, and went back to that town from which his forbears had come—to the grey city ‘looking out on the cold North Sea.’ There is no place in the world to be compared with the old mother city of Aberdeen for the love in which her children hold her. Wherever they go she is still their home, and from between her guardian rivers she watches her sons as they go forth and is glad over their success. So it was in the past, so is it now, and so may it be while the world lasts.