Record of family grace

A RECORD OF FAMILY GRACE. 19
as my grandmother used to call the Lord Chief Commis-
sioner, and Mr Balfour's nephew, James Gibson, afterwards
Sir James Gibson-Craig, and Henry Dundas (Lord Melville),
and witty Harry Erskine and Sir Harry Moncreiff, and
his distinguished son James, and Professor Eussell, with
Dr Jones, and Dr Colquhoun, and Dr Davidson, and
Mr Simeon of Cambridge, and also many Gibsons and
Elliots, and Pauls, and other family connections. I have
heard old men recalling the memories of these days,
telling of their re-unions, sometimes in the old house,
whose date is 1638, and on whose door-stone is inscribed
the text, " For we know that if our earthly house of this
tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, an
house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens "
(2 Cor. V. 1) ; sometimes on the summer evenings walking
under the venerable trees, or down the long, straight avenue,
with its elms and wide-spreading beeches ; or in the garden,
whose southern slope looks up to the grand city, with its
castle rock and its surrounding hills. There, while the
distant bells were chiming their curfew, the party would
wander up and down, entertaining one another with
varied conversation, in which it is said that the anecdotes
of the Laird, and he had a great fund of anecdote, were
always appreciated, and he told them with a manner