Memorials of John Geddes

memorial* of John Gedde*.
father nor by almost any of his compeers who had started
with him in Life's gay morn.* But the end was now
approaching, and the great proud heart was at length to
be calm and still. In the severe spring of 1881, he had
caught a cold which proved deep-seated, much more so
than many ailments that he had been wont easily to sur-
mount, and a persistent bronchitis was developed, from
which he never recovered. In the month of July, when at
Inverness, where I was engaged in an examination of the
Academy, I received a telegram that Father was seriously
ill, and I hastened to Invermarkie, but arrived only in time
to see him still alive, although unconscious and passing
away — a last sad scene I can still recall — with his youngest
daughter Charlotte bending over him with all tender care.
This was on Friday the 8th July 1881, and his eldest and
youngest thus met together at his dying bedside in the
upper room in the old paternal home.
His remains were interred with every token of respect
from his friends and fellow-parishioners in the resting-
place of his fathers, within the Churchyard of Wallakirk,
* In a letter earnestly dissuading the afore-mentioned emigration of his
youngest boy, he touched on this sad theme pathetically.
"I recollect," he wrote, "when Mr Cruickshank [the parish minister]
used to vaunt that he had a son in every quarter of the globe, and now where
are they ? Had they kept together, like the bundle of sticks in the fable, a
different account might be had of them."
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