doubt, though, this is a tough job you have on hand - it is so long
since I was a bairn.'

We came very close to each other in those talks. 'It is a queer
thing,' she would say softly, 'that near everything you write is
about this bit place. You little expected that when you began. I
mind well the time when it never entered your head, any more than
mine, that you could write a page about our squares and wynds. I
wonder how it has come about?'

There was a time when I could not have answered that question, but
that time had long passed. 'I suppose, mother, it was because you
were most at home in your own town, and there was never much
pleasure to me in writing of people who could not have known you,
nor of squares and wynds you never passed through, nor of a
country-side where you never carried your father's dinner in a
flagon. There is scarce a house in all my books where I have not
seemed to see you a thousand times, bending over the fireplace or
winding up the clock.'

'And yet you used to be in such a quandary because you knew nobody
you could make your women-folk out of! Do you mind that, and how
we both laughed at the notion of your having to make them out of
me?'

'I remember.'

'And now you've gone back to my father's time. It's more than
sixty years since I carried his dinner in a flagon through the long
parks of Kinnordy.'