Transactions. 9 



much I may perhaps be allowed to add, that to the industry and 

 high character of these Protestant refugees and their descendants 

 we owe the modest fortune that has come down to us, and wliich 

 enables us to prolong the occupation by our family of the home 

 of Annie Laurie. But more than this ; wo all, T suppose, value 

 that princii)le of association which clothes the world with 

 memories of the past, and finds in the beauties that surround us 

 the background of human history. It is the want of this that is 

 felt so deeply by our American cousins, and makes them feel 

 that the old world is so much richer than the new. I was 

 travelling to Windsor some years ago in company with some 

 American gentlemen, and as we crossed the Thames one of them 

 said — "Oh ! that's your river Thames is if? In our country we 

 should call it a ditch." I answered — "Yes, I daresay you would; 

 but in your country you have no ditches, or rivers either, with 

 Oxford, and Windsor Castle, and Runnymede, and Westminster 

 Abbey, and the Tower of London on their banks." " No," he 

 said, "you have me there." And to illustrate great principles 

 by small facts, it is this love of association with old memories 

 which prompted an American to write to me last year to ask for 

 some roots of ivy from our house, saying that many would value 

 cuttings taken from the home of Annie liaurie ; and which 

 induced another American, bearing our name, to invite me, in 

 virtue of some possible connection with us in the past, to visit 

 Chicago at the exhibition, with a free offer of the rights of 

 hospitality. I confess that I tind in the house in which we live, 

 verified in connection witli the family history of those who 

 inhabit it, a not altogether barren application of the law of 

 association. There may well have been sound religious 

 principle in that grandfather of Annie Laurie, who placed tlie 

 motto already quoted under his marriage stone. So with the 

 author of another motto over an old farmhouse door 

 on the property — "The fear of God be in this house." 

 The humble title which I bear is not that granted to my perse- 

 cuting ancestor by tiie second James (that has died out), but 

 that granted much more recently, on his retirement from the 

 bench after 27 years of judicial life, to my father's father, 

 described as " a learned and upright judge, noted as well for his 

 benevolence as for his erudition." I have nothing to unlearn 

 from him. 



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