Every Saturday night my father, though no scholar himself, caused us to bring home our books and our slates, and in his homely way he examined us--or rather he examined _them_ (the books and the slates)--as to the proficiency we had made. Of figures he did know something: grammar, he said, was a new invention, and there, for a time, his examinations were at fault, and he knew not how to judge or to decide. But (I being the eldest) as I grew up, he transferred the examination of my younger brothers, as regarded grammatical proficiency, to me. And well do I remember, that every weekly examination closed with the admonition--"Now, bairns, _persevere_. Ye see how your mother and me have to fecht late and early to keep ye at the schule; and it is my greatest ambition to see ye a' scholars. Learning is a grand thing; it is a fortune equal to the best estate in the kingdom--ay, even to the Duke o' Buccleugh's; but oh, the want o' it is a great calamity, as nane can tell ye better than your faither. Therefore, bairns, _persevere_; always strive to be at the head o' your class, and if I live to be an auld man, I shall see some o' ye leddies and gentlemen." Thus the word _persevere_ was for ever rung in our ears; and I believe, before any of us knew its meaning, we one and all put it in practice. And often, when the frost lay white upon the ground, before the sun got up, and even when the ice drew itself together like a piece of lace-work on the shallow pools, at the head of all the classes in our school, which were just like stepping-stairs, a barefooted and barelegged laddie, but with hands and face as clean as the linen on his back, might have been seen as the dux of every class: and all those barefeeted or barelegged laddies were the bairns of Robert Gray. "Persevere as ye are doing, Roderic," my old teacher used to say, "and ye will live to be an ornament to your country yet." I doubt all the ornament I have been to my country is hardly of a higher kind than that of a stucco or a paste-board figure on a mantelpiece, and perhaps not so much. However, be that as it may, I have the consolation to think that I have not passed through the world exactly as if I had been a cipher. I know it is a difficult and a delicate thing for a man to write a sketch of his own life, without committing shipwreck on the shoals and quicksands of egotism; but I will endeavour to steer clear of this, and while it is certain that I will "set down nought in malice," I trust that I shall be able to show that I will "nothing extenuate."