The remote parish of Strachan is formed by the romantic valley through which the Feugh finds its way from the Grampians to the Dee at Banchory-Ternan—a breezy upland region, redolent of heather and bog-myrtle, apt in its solitude to educate reflective individuality in one so disposed. In those days the road to the south over the Cairn o’ Mount passed through Glen Dye, under the shadow of Clochnaben, a road two centuries ago frequented by robbers, and invested with a halo of romance by tales of marvellous adventures. But Glen Dye has an interest of another kind. Centuries ago it was the home and property of the family of Cant, from whom Andrew Cant, the noted Covenanting preacher, was descended,[2] and with whom the more widely celebrated Immanuel Kant, chief factor in the philosophical thought of modern Europe, claimed connection. Strachan is thus associated in imagination with two of the most illustrious thinkers of the eighteenth century. Thomas Reid is in this way connected locally with his famous German philosophical contemporary, as well as by parallels in their lives which appear in the sequel, and by spiritual analogies in their philosophy. They are moreover united by their common antagonism to the scepticism of David Hume, who also through them is associated with the moorland valley of the Feugh, making it suggest to fancy three memorable intellectual figures. In Scotland David Hume and Thomas Reid are the two greatest names of their century in philosophy. Imagination is our only guide when we try to picture the boyhood of Thomas Reid in the homely surroundings at Strachan. The one recorded fact about him is, that in his tenth year the home education of the manse was followed by two years spent in the neighbouring parish school of Kincardine O’Neil. Thus far no signal signs of future eminence appeared. He was, it seems, an unprecocious youth, remarked for modesty and patient industry. The insight of the schoolmaster is said to have found in him the rudiments of a man of ‘good and well-wearing parts.’ I wish that some further record could be found of this sagacious prophet of his pupil’s steady mental concentration, and I have not discovered why the boy was placed in the Kincardine school. This dim picture is our only one in the first twelve years of his life. The lack of personal incident in those years is in a manner compensated by the interest of an illustrious ancestry—Reids and Gregories. He inherited mind through his father, but much more through his mother, with whom he shared the unique celebrity of a family which in successive generations shed lustre on the valley of the Dee—a memorable example of inherited intellect. * * * * *