CHILDHOOD 



XXIX 



experience, at least, was formative ; and in judging his character 

 it should not be forgotten. But Mrs. Jackson was not the only 

 stranger in their gates ; the Captain's sister, Aunt Anna Jenkin, 

 lived with them until her death ; she had all the Jenkin beauty 

 of countenance, though she was unhappily deformed in body 

 and of frail health ; and she even excelled her gentle and 

 ineffectual family in all amiable qualities. So that each of the 

 two races from which Fleeming sprang, had an outpost by his 

 very cradle ; the one he instinctively loved, the other hated ; 

 and the lifelong war in his members had begun thus early by a 

 victory for what was best. 



We can trace the family from one country place to another in 

 the south of Scotland ; where the 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 Hallowe'en observance : 

 i 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 Franpais peints par eux- 

 memes." ... It is full of pictures of all classes, with a descrip- 

 tion 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 play- 

 mate 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. 



His education, in the formal sense, began at Jedburgh. Edin 

 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. He used 

 to insist that all his bad schoolfellows had died early, a belief 



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