know what kind of providence the baker thought it!' cried my
grandfather.

But the sally must have been unique. In all else that I have heard
or read of him, so far from criticising, he was doing his utmost to
honour and even to emulate his wife's pronounced opinions. In the
only letter which has come to my hand of Thomas Smith's, I find him
informing his wife that he was 'in time for afternoon church';
similar assurances or cognate excuses abound in the correspondence
of Robert Stevenson; and it is comical and pretty to see the two
generations paying the same court to a female piety more highly
strung: Thomas Smith to the mother of Robert Stevenson--Robert
Stevenson to the daughter of Thomas Smith. And if for once my
grandfather suffered himself to be hurried, by his sense of humour
and justice, into that remark about the case of Providence and the
Baker, I should be sorry for any of his children who should have
stumbled into the same attitude of criticism. In the apocalyptic
style of the housekeeper of Invermay, woe be to that person! But
there was no fear; husband and sons all entertained for the pious,
tender soul the same chivalrous and moved affection. I have spoken
with one who remembered her, and who had been the intimate and
equal of her sons, and I found this witness had been struck, as I
had been, with a sense of disproportion between the warmth of the
adoration felt and the nature of the woman, whether as described or
observed. She diligently read and marked her Bible; she was a
tender nurse; she had a sense of humour under strong control; she
talked and found some amusement at her (or rather at her husband's)
dinner-parties. It is conceivable that even my grandmother was
amenable to the seductions of dress; at least, I find her husband
inquiring anxiously about 'the gowns from Glasgow,' and very