oval obstacles. The area in which these obstacles were found was then excavated and five piled floors, tooled by stone axes, were discovered. There were evidences of entrances to the structures of which these were the floors on the east side of each oval. The implements and pottery found on the site as well as the tooling of the timber suggest that the buildings belonged to the Stone Age, and that they composed a group or village of workshops, storehouses or shelters. These antiquities are comparable to the piled pits found in the Isle of Wight and in some other places. The evidence seems to show that they were used by people who lived a settled life in villages and had advanced in a certain measure in the arts.1

Stranraer is the centre of a good agricultural district. Dairying was highly developed in the fifties and sixties. The farmers were extensive breeders of cattle. Competition of range cattle from the United States and Canada and of frozen mutton from New Zealand had not begun. In general, the farmers were well off, some of them even had handsome establishments. There were no manufactures in the district. Farm labourers and poorer people in towns were, as a rule, Irish who had migrated from the north of Ireland, and there was besides an annual migration at harvest time of Irish reapers, who brought their reaping-hooks with them.

2

The social contours were sharply defined-the landed gentry, the Earl of Stair, his connections the Dalrymples, Sir Andrew Agnew of Lochnaw, and a few other proprietors on a smaller scale, formed the superior social stratum, while near them came the Cairds, who lived at Baldoon and afterwards at Genoch, Sir John Ross, the Arctic explorer, who lived at North-West Castle, the Alisons, who lived in the town, and some others. Then there came the professional people, and, following them, the farmers, the shopkeepers and the craftsmen, with the Irish farm and town labourers at the bottom of the social mound. In such a society the prevailing political colour was the blue of the Tory party. Some of the elections before the extension of the franchise in the burghs were hotly contested, but extreme radicalism was unknown. I remember a story of an election which occurred about 1860. The contest was a close one, the constituency was not numerically large, a dozen votes would turn the scale on one side or the other. One of the candidates, I forget which, or his agent, decided upon a

1 Mann, Ludovic Maclellan, F.S.A.Scot., Excavations in WigtownshirePrehistoric Pile-structures in Pits. A paper read to the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, May 11th, 1903, and reprinted from their Proceedings, Edinburgh, 1904. For an account of other antiquities of the region, see M'Kerlie, op. cit.

Sir James Caird, the well-known writer upon agricultural questions.

bold manœuvre in order to win the election. This manœuvre was, in effect, to kidnap a sufficient number of voters who were known to intend to vote on the other side and to keep them in durance until the election was over. About a dozen voters were invited to dinner at an inn in the country some miles from Stranraer. They were given excellent fare and kept amused for the required period.

There was little unemployment in the district at that time; begging was unusual. I recall only a single instance. One day a servant came to my father and told him that a man was begging at the door who spoke a language she could not understand. My father went to see the man, who promptly addressed him in Latin. He was a Hungarian, and he had been taught colloquial Latin at school as were all Hungarian boys.

In 1850, my father, then twenty-two years of age, was appointed master of the Free Church School at Stranraer. At the same time he married. I was born in that place in 1854. The impressions I have retained of my early years in Stranraer are those of a quiet, agreeable life and of a friendly, mature and cultivated society. The Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny cast dark shadows and left deep traces of a period of national crisis. Whether for that or other reasons, the social atmosphere of that time (1855-62) had a certain sombre hue. The Indian Mutiny made a great impression upon my parents, who named my younger brother after Sir Henry Havelock.

I went to school at the age of four years and six months. In accordance with the practice at that time, I began to learn Latin in the second year of my life at school. The chief concern of contemporary elementary education appeared to be the cultivation of the memory; at all events, this seemed to be the chief concern of mine. In after years Sir William van Horne told me that he had cultivated his memory, which was unusually retentive, by learning the numbers of railway cars as they passed by. The apparatus employed in my case was quite different. It was the Shorter Catechism. I am afraid that, considered as a gift of nature, my memory must have been a poor one, for the process of cultivating it was very hard. When a mistake was made in reciting the answers to the compendium of the Westminster Confession of Faith, which was by no means seldom, the additional task was imposed of committing to memory one of the longer psalms or a chapter from Isaiah. If this pana were not properly accomplished, then a hundred lines or more of Paradise Lost or portions of Scott's romantic poems were inflicted as a further task. I shall draw a veil over what occurred when these multiple impositions proved to be

ineffective. I am afraid that my reverence for the sacred text and for certain masterpieces of literature was not enhanced by their association in my mind with punishment. I am not sure that the method is the soundest that might be chosen; but perhaps for great dullness any other method might be quite fruitless. I think probably the effect upon me was beneficial, although the process was sometimes difficult to endure.

St. Augustine remarks with his customary candour, "I loved not study, and hated to be forced to it. Yet I was forced; and this was well done towards me; but I did not well; for unless forced, I had not learnt. But no one doth well against his will, even though what he doth be well. Yet neither did they well who forced me, but what was well came to me from Thee, my God." 1 I can subscribe to the greater part of this without compunction, for I was not destined to be a saint, and yet was almost incurably dull; but I cannot subscribe to the conclusion of St. Augustine, because so extreme piety to God were impiety to my instructors, the chief of whom was my own father. If any credit is due for even partial success in the employment of force, some credit at least must be given to the human instrument even although the weapon by means of which the force was applied was sometimes wielded with extreme vigour.

The process is not agreeable to experience, but there is much to be said for physical correction. A man who has not been sharply chastised for offences in his youth is generally recognisable in his maturity by undesirable qualities and by the perpetration of offences which bring upon him, or ought to bring upon him, punishment much harder to be borne than physical thrashing.

Although I performed my school tasks with difficulty and under compulsion, I had an insatiable curiosity for what lay outside of these. Before I was nine years of age I had read rather copiously not merely the books customarily read by boys of that time, but more solid books on history and travel. I remember reading with great pleasure Washington Irving's Mahomet and his Successors. In 1862 I began to read Gibbon. I did not finish him at that time, but the impression of some of the chapters I read then still remains in my mind. It was my fortune to read him in the original quarto edition. I devoured Gordon-Cumming's African books, and read Speke's Journal of the Discovery of the Nile immediately on its appearance in 1863. I read Thackeray's Four Georges in the Cornhill Magazine (Vol. II., 1860) within a short time after its appearance. In the 1 From the quaint translation of Dr. Pusey.

same volume of the Cornhill there appeared Ruskin's Unto this Last; but I do not think I read this until somewhat later. I recall being much impressed by an anonymous poem also in this volume, Ariadne at Naxos. Some years afterwards it transpired that this poem was by a young man of genius, Thomas Davidson, probationer of the United Presbyterian Church, who died at Jedburgh in 1870. In addition to the Cornhill and some other magazines, the Saturday Review was available, and I began to read it in the early sixties. Probably I had rather more opportunity than the average Scots boy of my time to engage in discursive reading, but my case was by no means unusual. Of my school-fellows of these early days I retain the vaguest recollection; only one of them, so far as I know, attained distinction. He came to be known to the world as Sir Leander Starr Jameson. His father was a Writer to the Signet, and was living in Edinburgh when Jameson was born in 1853. Shortly afterwards the family removed to Stranraer, where the elder Jameson became editor of a newspaper. In my recollection, Mr. Jameson was a man of intellectual aspect whose neck was encircled by the "stock" of the period. I remember Mrs. Jameson quite vividly. She was a distinguished-looking, rather small lady, who often wore, as was then customary, a cashmere shawl. She had sharp intelligent features, a prim air, and precision in her speech and manners. Both Mr. and Mrs. Jameson were frequent visitors at our house; but I have no recollection of their son, although I believe that he and I were in the same class when we were about six years of age.

Among our other friends in Stranraer were Mr. Charles, the Free Church minister, and Dr. Orgle, the leading physician in the district. Both were worthy and intelligent men. The latter was of the type described with so sympathetic a pen by "Ian Maclaren."1 Sir John Ross, who was a son of the parish minister of Inch, near Stranraer, died in 1856. Of course I do not remember him; but he was a friend of my parents, who were often at North-West Castle, where they met the Ommaneys and others who were interested in Arctic exploration. Sir John Ross used to like to have such people about him. I have before me two duodecimo volumes bound in calf, each with a simple bookplate, "Mr. Ross." These little books contain the poetical works of John Dyer and Ambrose Philips, with lives of the authors by Samuel Johnson. They were published by Samuel Bagster in 1807, and were part of a set of the poets in a hundred and twenty-four volumes

1 The late Dr. Watson who was for a time minister of St. Matthew's Church, Glasgow, and was a friend of my later years.

Sir Erasmus Ommaney was one of Parry's captains.

given by King George IV. to Mr. Ross on the eve of his departure on his voyage to the Arctic regions in 1829. Ross may or may not have taken these books with him; but if he did, and if he took them up to beguile the tedium of an Arctic night, he must have been more amused by the pungent criticisms of Johnson than by the tiresome verses of these minor poets. After Ross's death the bulk of the collection came into the hands of my father. In his Narrative,1 published in 1835, Ross gives an account of his arrival at Loch Ryan, which he had chosen as the place of rendezvous for his ships, of a mutiny on board of one of them, and of his departure from the loch on his northern adventure.

The Stranraer people had long been interested in Arctic exploration. They subscribed liberally to the fund raised for the journey of Captain George Back in 1833-5.2 The early interest of our family circle in the Arctic regions was not confined to the explorations of the two Rosses (Sir James Clark Ross was a nephew of Sir John, and was also a Wigtownshire man), or to the whaling voyages of my grandfather. My uncle, Captain John Bridie, was also familiar with Arctic conditions, and during an interval between voyages (he was then in command of the Kohinoor East Indiaman) he was sent for by Lady Franklin, who desired the benefit of his experience and advice. She was then (in 1857) fitting out the Fox, which, under the command of M'Clintock, was sent by her to discover the fate of her husband.

In my childhood, my favourite place of resort was Castle Kennedy. The formal gardens and terraces were at that time very celebrated. The old castle is a ruin, and the new Loch Inch Castle had not then been built. The grounds had been laid out in the Dutch style before the middle of the eighteenth century. A few years before my time the head gardener of the Earl of Stair,3 Archibald Fowler, had begun to plant conifers systematically. Now these trees must be more than seventy years old, and the aspect of the place must be very much changed. One of the features of Castle Kennedy as I remember it was the avenue of auricaria as well as the numerous individual trees of this species on the lawns.

1 Narrative of a Second Voyage in search of a North-West Passage, and of a Residence in the Arctic Regions during the years 1829, 1830, 1831, 1832 and 1833. By Sir John Ross, C.B., etc. London, 1835.

Back, Captain George, R.N., Narrative of the Arctic Land Expedition, etc. (London, 1836), p. 663.

3 Baddeley, in his Guide to Scotland, Part I. ((ed. 1889), p. 15, says enthusiastically that "Mr. Fowler's knowledge of trees can only be compared with that ascribed to King Solomon"; but it may fairly be inquired, "Why drag in Solomon ?”