Transactions. 9 
much I may perhaps be allowed to add, that to the industry and 
high character of these Protestant refugees and their descendants 
we owe the modest fortune that has come down to us, and which 
enables us to prolong the occupation by our family of the home 
of Annie Laurie. But more than this; we all, I suppose, value 
that principle of association which clothes the world with 
memories of the past, and finds in the beauties that surround us 
the background of human history. It is the want of this that is 
felt so deeply by our American cousins, and makes them feel 
that the old world is so much richer ~than the new. I was 
travelling to Windsor some years ago in company with some 
American gentlemen, and as we crossed the Thames one of them 
said—‘ Oh ! that’s your river Thames is it? In our country we 
should call it a ditch.” I answered—“ Yes, I daresay you would; 
but in your country you have no ditches, or rivers either, with 
Oxford, and Windsor Castle, and Runnymede, and Westminster 
Abbey, and the Tower of London on their banks.” ‘ No,” he 
said, ‘you have me there.” And to illustrate great principles 
by small facts, it is this love of association with old memories 
which prompted an American to write to me last year to ask for 
some roots of ivy from our house, saying that many would value 
cuttings taken from the home of Annie Laurie; and which 
induced another American, bearing our name, to invite me, in 
virtue of some possible connection with us in the past, to visit 
Chicago at the exhibition, with a free offer of the rights of 
hospitality. I confess that I find in the house in which we live, 
verified in connection with the family -history of those who 
‘inhabit it, a not altogether barren application of the law of 
association. There may well have been sound religious 
principle in that grandfather of Annie Laurie, who placed the 
motto already quoted under his marriage stone. So with the 
author of another motto over an old farmhouse door 
on the property—‘“ The fear of God be in this house.” 
The humble title which I bear is not that granted to my perse- 
cuting ancestor by the second James (that has died out), but 
that granted much more recently, on his retirement from the 
bench after 27 years of judicial life, to my father’s father, 
deseribed as ‘a learned and upright judge, noted as well for his 
benevolence as for his erudition.” I have nothing to unlearn 
from him, - 
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