Memorials of John Geddes

evening of Elf?,
rescue, enabling him in his humble sphere to cull the trea-
sures of pleasant remembrance and airy fancy from the
stored-up past, and although he would occasionally speak
gloomily and talk as if the earth was now for him a
"cavern," his genial cheerfulness and even buoyancy were
remarkable.* The stern discipline of life had brought
home to him many lessons as to man's mortality, and he
once told me that, when he was a young man, the daily
spectacle of the shattered towers of Strathbogie Castle,
with all its gorgeous but ruined emblazoning, overlooking
Huntly town, read to him in his boyish years a pensive
lesson of the futility and vanity of all earthly grandeur.
Hence he early learned, notwithstanding all his ambitions,
the great lesson of life, that it is only a finite measure of
happiness that is enjoyable by the happiest in this sub-
lunary world. He also recognised the good hand of Pro-
vidence as having so ordered his lot that he had seen
considerably beyond the allotted span of the three score
years and ten, and this span, too, largely exempt from
labour and sorrow — a period of life not reached by his own
* At times he would indulge, not always sincerely we thought, in the
Byronic vein, using phrases where less was meant than really met the ear.
Thus he would talk of his wish to make his bed among the clods of the valley
at Wallakirk, and would speak of his last transit there as an excursion in
his "timber trews," meaning his wooden coffin, a quip of wit which he turned
on oftener than his family generally liked to hear.
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