There was in another corner near the fire-place a little table and above it hung a couple of shelves for books of another sort, the Bible and The Westminster Confession, Bunyan and Baxter and Fox's Book of Martyrs, Rutherford and McCheyne and Law, The Ten Years' Conflict, Spurgeon's Sermons and Smith's Isaiah, and a well worn copy of the immortal Robbie.

This was the mother's corner, a cosy spot where she nourished her soul by converse with the great masters of thought and of conscience.
In this "cosy wee hoosie" Malcolm McNish and his mother passed their quiet evenings, for the days were given to toil, in talk, not to say discussion of the problems, the rights and wrongs of the working man.
They agreed in much; they differed, and strongly, in point of view.

The mother was all for reform of wrongs with the existing economic system, reverencing the great Adam Smith.

The son was for a new deal, a new system, the Socialistic, with modifications all his own.

All, or almost all, that Malcolm had read the mother had read with the exception of Marx.