Page:Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin. Records of a family of engineers.pdf/48

 family in all amiable qualities, So that each of the two races from which Fleeming sprang, had an outpost by his very cradle; the one he instinctively loved, the other hated; and the life. long war in his members had begun thus early by a victory for what was best,

We can trace the family from one country place to another in the south of Scotland; where the child learned his taste for sport by riding home the pony from the moors, Before he was nine he could write such a passage as this about a Hallowe'en observance: 'I pulled a middling sized cabbage-runt with a pretty sum of gold about it. No witches would ran after me when I was sowing my hempseed this year; my nuts blazed away together very comfortably to the end of their lives, and when mamma put hers in which were meant for hersclf and papa they blazed away in the like manner.' Before he was

en he could write, with a really irritating precocity, that he had been ' making some pictures from a book called "Les Français peints par euxmêmes." … It is full of pictures of all classes, with a description of each in French. The pictures are a little caricatured, but not