The Book-Hunter | Page 5

sister Eliza never was forgiven for her unfortunate marriage.
Affection for her husband and for his memory prevented her
apologising for it, and her children were not of the sort to apologise for
their existence. A series of petty slights, small unkindnesses, imbittered
the mind of the poverty-stricken widow against her unmarried sisters,
and her feeling was strongly inherited by her children.
A house in Old Aberdeen has been already mentioned as the abode of
Mrs Margaret Brown, Dr Burton's last surviving aunt. This quaint old
house had been purchased by Mrs Brown's grandmother, mother of the
laird of Grandholm, and at the beginning of the century was inhabited
by her maiden daughter Margaret, or, as she was oftener called, Peggy
Paton. This lady lived to the age of ninety, and at her death left her
house and fortune to her niece and name-daughter, Margaret Paton
(Mrs Brown), who in her turn adopted a grand-niece, the daughter
already mentioned of Dr Burton's eldest brother, William,--the same
who, having nursed her aged aunt till her death, in the last year of his
life so tenderly ministered to her uncle, the subject of this notice.
The second in the line of female owners of the old house, Peggy Paton,
was, for the outer world, what George Eliot calls "a charicter"--one of
those distinguishing features of country-town life which the march of
improvement has swept away: a lady by birth, but owing little to
schools or teachers, books or travel: a woman of strong natural

understanding and some wit, who loved her nightly rubber at whist,
could rap out an oath or a strong pleasantry, and whose quick estimates
of men and things became proverbs with the younger generation.
For her inner circle Peggy Paton was a most motherly old maid. She it
was who, when she found her niece Eliza would marry Lieutenant
Burton, mediated between father and daughter, and arranged matters as
well as might be in an affair in which her good sense found much to
disapprove, and her heart much to excuse. Not only to her niece
Margaret, her adopted daughter, but also to her other nieces at
Grandholm, motherless by death, and fatherless by desertion, did she
fill a mother's part as far as these robust virgins would permit her.
Sister Eliza's rough little children, or rougher great boys, always found
kindness in the house in the Old Town, first in their grand-aunt's[4]
time, and afterwards in that of her successor, Mrs Brown. David, Dr
Burton's younger brother, was lovingly tended by them during part of
the lingering illness of which he died, and the youngest of Eliza Paton's
sons remained an inmate of Mrs Brown's house that he might continue
his education in Aberdeen, when his mother removed to Edinburgh.
[Footnote 4: It may not be counted indelicate, as it refers to a period
120 years gone by, to mention that Peggy Paton once had a lover, and
that this, her first lover, was no other than the son of that Moir of
Stoneywood, whose correspondence is so frequently quoted in Dr
Burton's 'History of Scotland.' The young man was Peggy's first cousin,
the lairds of Grandholm and Stoneywood having married
sisters--Mackenzie by name. The laird of Stoneywood is known to
posterity by his ingenious achievement of ferrying the rebel army
across the Dornoch Firth in small fishing-boats collected by
Stoneywood all along the coast. On the defeat of the Pretender, and the
suppression of the insurrection in 1746, Stoneywood's estate was
confiscated, and he fled to the Continent. Family tradition adds that his
escape was achieved by his disguising himself as a miller and
swimming across the Don from Stoneywood to Grandholm, where the
laird of Grandholm, who was of opposite politics, had removed the
ferry-boat, and saw but did not denounce his kinsman. The houses of
Grandholm and Stoneywood are exactly opposite each other on the two

sides of the Don. Mrs Moir of Stoneywood did not immediately follow
her husband, but remained with her friends to bring up her children,
among them Miss Peggy's lover, who, soon after his engagement to her,
joined his father on the Continent and there died.]
For those who do not know Aberdeen, it may be proper to say that Old
Aberdeen is as entirely distinct from New Aberdeen as Edinburgh is
from Leith--in a different way. The distance between them is somewhat
greater, about two miles; and whereas New Aberdeen is a highly
prosperous commercial city, as entirely devoid of beauty or interest as
any city under the sun, Old Aberdeen is a sweet, still, little place,
hardly more than a village in size, in appearance utterly unlike any
other place in Scotland, resembling a little English cathedral town,--the
towers and spires of college and cathedral beautifully seen through
ancient