Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, No. 688 / March 3, 1877

A TWEEDSIDE REMINISCENCE, BY W. CHAMBERS, LL.D.
I propose giving one of my early recollections, which lately turned up in the memory of the past. It refers to an incident which occurred only a few years after the beginning of the present century, when I was a boy at the burgh school of Peebles, a small town on the Tweed. The school in its way had a somewhat superior reputation, and drew to it pupils from a distance of several miles around. Trudging in all weathers, the children of farmers and ploughmen came to be educated along with boys and girls belonging to the town. Whatever they were, all were treated alike, and the intermingling of classes was never found to be in any respect disadvantageous; on the contrary, there sprung up agreeable acquaintanceships between the town and country boys that were mutually useful and agreeable.
Among the crowd of country lads who thronged in daily, there was one I have some cause to remember. His name was Rob Graham. I will try to give a picture of Rob. Imagine a sturdy boy of twelve years of age, well knit together, barelegged and barefooted in summer, with coarse red hair surmounting a brow so large that one would say there were good brains under it. Rob's face was placid like that of an old man, and I think was slightly marked with small-pox, as was then not at all unusual. His dress, of a simple kind, consisted of a pair of dingy corduroy trousers and waistcoat, and a short coat of that coarse fabric known as Galashiels blue, with two broad metal buttons staring out behind; which buttons, from their well-worn appearance, had probably embellished a succession of coats of Rob's father and grandfather; for in those days buttons were buttons, and went through a good deal of service before being dismissed. As the fastenings of the dress could with a rive of the hand be rapidly torn asunder, the wearer could at any moment throw off clothes and shirt and plunge into the river stark naked. As Rob's leather cap, stuck on the top of his shock of red hair, was worth very little, we should deal liberally in estimating his whole equipment at the value of twenty shillings.