This assertion, not being deniable, would elicit the reflection that there was then nothing beyond the ordinary in the circumstance, except that such a thing should happen to the Major, "who had always been the most proper of men, a member of St. Jude's Kirk, and of the very best society"; and this reflection would probably end the matter. There would be no sympathetic words, and no offers of nice, soft, mushy things to eat for a man nearly ninety, who could so flagrantly violate the ordinary Scotch traditions with regard to teething. How women of other nationalities would receive such a piece of news, I leave my readers to decide. One thing is certain, no two groups of different race and environments, creed or education, would take even such a simple household matter in quite the same spirit and manner. Let men be thankful for the variableness of women. It provides them continually with something to admire, or to wonder over.
Among such scenes and people as I have been describing I spent nearly ten years; and the first three or four of these ten were, in some respects, the happiest years of my life. Their very memory is a blessing unto this day, for often, when I am heart and brain weary, it steals upon me, swift and sweet and sure as a vision. I smell the China trees and the pine. I hear the fluting of the wind, and the tinkling of guitars. I see the white-robed girls waltzing in the moonshine down the broad sidewalks of the avenue, and the men, some in full evening dress, and others in all kinds of picturesque frontier fashion, strolling leisurely down its royally wide highway. I am sitting in the little wood house, with its whitewashed ceilings and unpainted stairway and one sits at my side, who left me forty-five years ago. Oh, believe me! He who raised the shade of Helen, had no greater gift than mine!
About the middle of October Robert finished the work intrusted to him by the Ways and Means Committee of the Session of 1856, and finished it so well, and so completely, that Senator J. W. Throckmorton, Chairman of the Senate Committee, and the Honorable C. W. Buckley, Chairman of the House Committee, entered in their report to the House, the following acknowledgment: