80 MEMOIR OF FLEEMING JENKIN 



child learned his taste for sport by riding home the 

 pony from the moors. Before he was nine, he 

 could write such a passage as this about a Hallow- 

 e'en observance : ' I pulled a middling-sized 

 cabbage-runt with a pretty sum of gold about it. 

 No witches would run after me when I was sowing 

 my hempseed this year : my nuts blazed away 

 together very comfortably to the end of their lives, 

 and when mamma put hers in which were meant 

 for herself and papa they blazed away in the like 

 manner.' Before he was ten he could write, with a 

 really irritating precocity, that he had been ' making 

 some pictures from a book called Les Frangais 

 peints par eux-memes. ... It is full of pictures 

 of all classes, with a description of each in French. 

 The pictures are a little caricatured, but not much.' 

 Doubtless this was only an echo from his mother, 

 but it shows the atmosphere in which he breathed. 

 It must have been a good change for this art critic 

 to be the playmate of Mary Macdonald, their 

 gardener's daughter at Barjarg, and to sup with 

 her family on potatoes and milk; and Fleeming 

 himself attached some value to this early and 

 friendly experience of another class. 

 Edinburgh His education, in the formal sense, began at 

 fort. ^^" "Jedburgh. Thence he went to the Edinburgh 

 Academy, where Clerk Maxwell was his senior and 

 Tait his classmate ; bore away many prizes ; and 

 was once unjustly flogged by Rector Williams. 



