ANECDOTE OF HIS YOUTH. 357 
“During a journey to Glasgow, Mrs. Watt entrusted 
her young son James to one of her friends. After a few 
weeks she returned to see him, but most assuredly not 
expecting the reception she met with. “ Madam,” said 
her friend, as soon as she saw her, “ you must hasten to 
take James back to Greenock. I can no longer endure 
the state of excitement into which he throws me; I 
am harrassed by want of sleep.. Every night, when 
the usual hour approaches for the family to retire to 
bed, your son adroitly contrives to raise a discussion,. 
in the course of which he always finds means to intro- 
duce a story ; this story is sure necessarily to engender 
a second, and a third, &c. And these tales, whether 
they be pathetic or comic, are so charming, so interest- 
ing, that the whole of my family listen to them with such 
attention, that a fly might be heard to fly. Thus, hours 
follow hours, without our being aware of it; but the next 
day I am ready to drop with fatigue. Dear madam, 
take your son home.” 
James Watt had a younger brother, John,* who, by 
deciding to follow his father’s profession, left James the 
liberty of choosing any vocation ; for according to Scotch 
customs, it suffices if one son adopts the paternal career. 
But it was difficult to say what vocation this would be, 
for the young student seemed to succeed equally well in 
whatever he tried. 
The shores of Loch Lomond, already so ‘celebrated by 
the reminiscences that they afford of the historian Bu- 
chanan, and of the illustrious inventor of Logarithms, 
biographies, and from which I myself, deceived by verbal references 
too easily. accepted, should otherwise have fallen into. 
* He was lost in 1762, in one of his father’s ships, on her passage 
from Greenock to America, aged twenty-three years. 
