Though undoubtedly originally Highland, and, as my father averred, able to claim kindred with the highest of his name, the MacAlpines had long been domiciled in the south. My father was the son of a neighbouring minister, and had only escaped the fate of succeeding his father in the charge by a Highland aversion to taking the sacrament at the age when he was called upon to do so--in order that, by the due order of the Church of Scotland, he might be taken on his trials as a student in Divinity. He had also, about that date, further complicated matters by marrying my mother, Grace Lyon, the penniless daughter of a noted Cameronian elder of the parish of Eden Valley. In order to support her, and (after a little) _us_, John MacAlpine had accepted a small school far up the glen, from which, after a year or two, on the appointment of Dr. Forbes to the parish, he had followed his old college friend to Eden Valley itself. Under his care the little academy had gradually been organized on the newest and best scholastic lines known to the time. Even for girls classics and mathematics played a prominent part. Samplers and knitting, which had previously formed a notable branch of the curriculum, were banished to an hour when little Miss Huntingdon taught the girls, locked in her own department like Wykliffites in danger of the fires of Tower Hill. And at such times my father almost ran as he passed the door of the infant school and thought of the follies which were being committed within. "Samplers," he was wont to mutter, "samplers--when they might be at their Ovid!" My mother--Gracie Lyon that was--had none of the stern blood of her Cameronian forebears, nor yet my father's tempestuous Norland mood. She was gentle, patient, with little to say for herself--like Leah, tender-eyed (in the English, not in the Hebrew sense)--and I remember well that as a child one of my great pleasures was to stroke her cheek as she was putting me to sleep, saying, "Mother, how soft your skin is. It is like velvet!" "Aye," she would answer, with a sigh gentle as herself, "so they used to tell me!" And I somehow knew that "they" excluded my father, but whom it included I did not know then nor for many a day after.