ABSTRACT
I Was born at 4 Royal. Crescent, in the city of Glasgow, on April 28, 1855, the third son of John William Muirhead, writer, and Mary Burns. My relatives on my father's side, in contrast to those on my mother's, were people of the world, perhaps even what were then called “worldly people.” My great-grandfather was a master saddler and a town councillor of Glasgow. My grandfather was a naval officer in the service of the East India Company, whose still surviving literary remains consist of log-books of three voyages to India between 1790 and 1800. His wife was a daughter of Captain Samuel Crook of the 26th Cameronian Regiment, an Irishman likely enough of the type that Charles Lever introduces in his novels. My relatives on my mother's side were mostly religious people, as religion was then known, many of them ministers of the Presbyterian Church and belonging to the earnest evangelical portion of it that “came out” at the Disruption in 1843 to form the Free Church of Scotland with its ensign of the Burning Bush; one of them, Dr. Thomas Guthrie, who married a cousin of my mother's, attaining more than national distinction as a preacher and philanthropist. The pious traditions of this line of ancestry were kept up in my grandmother's house, as I recollect it after the death of my grandfather, Islay Burns, an inspector of customs in Glasgow. Her earnest extempore prayers at morning and evening “worship,” and the eloquent Biblical phrases with which they were interspersed are still one of the vividest of my childish memories. Her frequent appeal to the “angel that redeems from all evil” on behalf of “the lads” (i.e. my brothers and myself) was not the least of what I owe to my Victorian upbringing, as a prophylactic. This custom, though not the extempore prayers, survived in my own home up to my mother's death in 1892.
