SOME NOTES CONCERNING ASHIESTBEL l47 



that he had been farming Deloraine, and been allowed to 

 sublet. 



There was not much choice of professions in Scotland in 

 the half-century between the second Union and the expansion 

 of the "Empire" in the latter half of the 18th century. 



A youDger brother, William Russell, had exhausted the 

 law, and was a Principal Clerk of Session. It may be 

 mentioned that he married the widow of either the last, or 

 one of the last of the Napiers of Kilmahew, an old stock 

 which seems to have entirely disappeared ; Lady Kilmahew 

 as she was called. They had one daughter, who married Mr 

 Eeid, and also had one daughter, who lived to a great age, 

 as Mrs Anne Reid ; and when she died, in the latter half 

 of the nineteenth century, endowed a small school for boys 

 in the southern part of Edinburgh, which was going on up 

 to the School Board period, and has probably been absorbed 

 into something else. 



A third brother, Alexander, was farming Elibank when 

 he was drowned crossing the Tweed. He must have been 

 a fine young man. I think the same feat has been done 

 elsewhere, but it was remembered that at an election at 

 Selkirk, when the people of the town chose to be 

 dissatisfied with the choice of the limited number of 

 freeholders who settled it, they, the proprietor-electors, were 

 besieged in the inn by the mob, and it seemed as if there 

 might be some difficulty in getting away. When Alexander 

 Russell jumped from the window on to the heads of the 

 crowd, and cleared a space round the door with his hunting- 

 whip ! A son of his, who must have been born before they 

 went to Elibank, at Windydoors on the Bowland estate, has 

 never been altogether forgotten ; Russell's Ancient and Modern 

 Europe long kept its ground as a standard book. It is De 

 Quincey who says he had never lost his first impression of 

 Homer's Iliad, from Russell's paraphrase, in a style that 

 rather suited a boy. (James Russell, of Ashiesteel, seems 

 to have been an active yeomanry man. I do not know what 

 caused them to be embodied about the middle of the 18th 

 century, but Pringle of Torwoodlee was the commander.) 



