Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III A BUNDLE OF OLD LETTERS, 1789-1793 OF the letters exchanged between Balwysie and Glasgow in those stirring years of the world's history, a goodly number still survive?those of the elder brother only. Precious indeed, in the eyes of both sender and receiver, were those old sheets of foolscap, so neatly covered by the precise, almost ladylike, handwriting of Mr. James Kennoway, who, although he was the most unpretending and unassuming of men, had no false modesty about those letters?he knew that they were valuable, and regularly numbered and dated each one of them on the outside before he despatched it to the west by the Dundee carrier; whilst even Richard, the most incorrigibly careless of boys, was so far overawed by the spirit of the age that he as regularly recorded the time of arrival in Glasgow of each epistle handed to him by Mally of the Grammar School Wynd, along with the latest consignment of books, or butter, or new shirts, just fetched by her from Findlay in the Trongate. Between those old correspondents and the letter-carrying arrangements of their country there existed a very deadly feud, and the last thought of any man or woman, quill in hand at a desk, was that of entrusting the sheets on which such pains were bestowed to the care of the national post-office; for valuable as their outpourings undoubtedly were, the writer was sadly aware that the persons to whom they were addressed would, in view of the absurd charge on delivery, look upon the arrival of what they called " a post-letter" as a species of calamity?" the sore expense of a post-letter " is a dolorous wail culled from one of the yellow pages so long and so carefully preserved. The complete letter-writer of old was indeed a sort of smuggler, and even as the fine pompous periods came sl...