302 SIR WILLIAM RAMSAY 



happily married and the comradeship which subsisted 

 between the husband and wife is illustrated throughout 

 by the letters, some of which have been quoted, showing 

 that she was always the first to hear news from the 

 laboratory, as well as to be consulted on all the concerns 

 of their family life. His pride and happiness in the 

 doings of his two children when young is also shown in 

 many letters. Ramsay was spared to practise Vart d'etre 

 grand-pere, for his daughter married happily in 1906 and 

 grandchildren came to enrich the family circle. It was 

 a great pleasure to him that during what may be called 

 the last happy summer of his life, that of 1913, before 

 the war cloud gathered, he had the children with him, 

 and introduced them to the delights of a holiday in the 

 Highlands. His old and ever kind friend, Sir Andrew 

 Noble, had lent him a lonely old castle on a rocky 

 promontory on Loch Fyne. It had till then been a 

 ruin and had only just been restored, and in this romantic 

 setting he was able to give his grandchildren their first 

 experiences of swimming and rowing and the manage- 

 ment of boats. It would be difficult to say which was 

 the happiest of the party. 



That Ramsay had long ago gained experience in the 

 ways of children, and profited by it, is shown by the 

 following passage contained in a letter to Dr. George 

 M'Gowan so long ago as March, 1886, when his own son 

 and daughter were children : 



" I think you will, if your experience is like mine, find a young 

 human being a very uninteresting person for a year and a half. 



