12 SIK WILLIAM EAMSAY 



seated between his parents in a pew in the front gallery of Free 

 St. Matthew's Church in Glasgow. During the long doctrinal 

 discourses of the minister, I used to wonder what the little boy 

 in the next pew was doing ; he seemed to be intently reading 

 his Bible. In after years he told me he was learning French, or 

 German. Most Scottish boys of that time, all Scottish boys 

 brought up in a Calvinistic household as Ramsay was were 

 at home in the language of the Bible. He took a French or a 

 German Bible to church in his pocket ; during the sermon he 

 read it. To translate into English did not require the help of 

 a dictionary ; the English text was at his finger-ends. He used 

 to say that even his mother a strict Calvinist could not object 

 to her son reading his Bible in church. As he read, and translated 

 backwards and forwards, he heard what the minister was saying. 

 Years afterwards he often took me back to Free St. Matthew's 

 church by repeating screeds of the sermons of the Reverend 

 Samuel Miller. In a letter I had from Ramsay in 1913, he recalled 

 the old days by drawing a rough sketch of the church and marking 

 the places where various members of the flock used to sit. Unlike 

 many scientific men, Ramsay had an excellent visualising memory. 

 We often wondered, he and I, what the minister meant by praying 

 that one of the Elders of the Church, a big burly man, ' might go 

 in and out as a he-goat before the congregation/ ' 



Another early friend was Robert Dowie Urquhart, 

 now an advocate in Edinburgh. He tells us that he 

 and Willie Ramsay were together among the first pupils 

 of a Scots-Canadian in a house in the then western- 

 most district of Glasgow. 



" Our teacher," he says, " I can visualise almost as if he were 

 before me, and I realise that the pupils of that engaging person- 

 ality with his strong features and kind eyes were beginning their 

 school life under the best of auspices. My earliest recollections 



