Repeated receptions of this sort must be at the root, I suppose, of what they call the Great American Jest; and I know I was myself goaded into saying that my friends went naked in the summer months, and that the Second Methodist Episcopal Church in Muskegon was decorated with scalps.

I cannot say that these flights had any great success; they seemed to awaken little more surprise than the fact that my father was a Republican or that I had been taught in school to spell COLOUR without the U.If I had told them (what was after all the truth) that my father had paid a considerable annual sum to have me brought up in a gambling hell, the tittering and grinning of this dreadful family might perhaps have been excused.
I cannot deny but I was sometimes tempted to knock my Uncle Adam down; and indeed I believe it must have come to a rupture at last, if they had not given a dinner party at which I was the lion.

On this occasion, I learned (to my surprise and relief) that the incivility to which I had been subjected was a matter for the family circle and might be regarded almost in the light of an endearment.

To strangers I was presented with consideration; and the account given of "my American brother-in-law, poor Janie's man, James K.Dodd, the well-known millionnaire of Muskegon," was calculated to enlarge the heart of a proud son.
An aged assistant of my grandfather's, a pleasant, humble creature with a taste for whiskey, was at first deputed to be my guide about the city.
With this harmless but hardly aristocratic companion, I went to Arthur's Seat and the Calton Hill, heard the band play in the Princes Street Gardens, inspected the regalia and the blood of Rizzio, and fell in love with the great castle on its cliff, the innumerable spires of churches, the stately buildings, the broad prospects, and those narrow and crowded lanes of the old town where my ancestors had lived and died in the days before Columbus.
But there was another curiosity that interested me more deeply--my grandfather, Alexander Loudon.

In his time, the old gentleman had been a working mason, and had risen from the ranks more, I think, by shrewdness than by merit.