Gordon book

58 The Gordon Book
where was laid the first stone, and who can recall the events that
centre in their minds round that foundation ceremony.
All honour to the man who furnished the means of founding this
seat of learning, this link binding the present generation to the past,
this anchor, in some cases, amid the stress of life ! Alexander Milne
was born in Fochabers about the year 1742. He was for a time a
servant at Gordon Castle, but quitted the service of his Grace to go
to America — the result, if report be true, of his independent spirit.
Those were the days when the perrnque was still worn, and the story
goes that, on the change of fashion, the Duke ordered his domestic to
cut his queue. Milne had a mind to wear his hair as he thought fit,
and his Grace to be obeyed, so they parted, Milne going to push his
fortunes across the seas. But the " bountiful blind woman " did not
smile on him for some time, and this wooer of Fortune is said, as in
the case of Goldsmith, to have played his way through some cities,
and afterwards to have opened business on the American streets as a
vendor of small lamps, a wheelbarrow containing all his stock-in-trade.
Be that as it may, he seems to have been possessed of alert sagacity
and true Scot's grit, and Fortune eventually opened to him her bounti-
ful hand.
It was in New Orleans that he settled, and there, after amassing a
considerable fortune, he died in October, 1838, at the age of 96. Having
had a hard struggle with fortune, he was probably even stern in his ideas
as to how business should be conducted. A relative, whom he had set
up in business for himself in America, one day proposed taking a short
holiday. But "holiday" was no word in the old man's business voca-
bulary, and he is reported immediately to have retorted : " If you wish
a holiday, then bring me the key."
Fochabers was by no means the only place which participated in
the result of his labours. His money was bequeathed in many a deserv-
ing way, and in the State of Louisiana alone he gave the means of
founding and endowing no fewer than four asylums for destitute orphan