Scott, speaking apparently as an eye-witness, says: "We shall never forget one particular evening when he (Smith) put an elderly maiden lady who presided at the tea-table to sore confusion by neglecting utterly her invitation to be seated, and walking round and round the circle, stopping ever and anon to steal a lump from the sugar basin, which the venerable spinster was at length constrained to place on her own knee, as the only method of securing it from his uneconomical depredations. His appearance mumping the eternal sugar was something indescribable." It is probably the same story Robert Chambers gives in his Traditions of Edinburgh, and he makes the scene Smith's own parlour, and the elderly spinster his cousin, Miss Jean Douglas. It may have been so, for Scott, as a school companion of young David Douglas, would very likely have been occasionally at Panmure House.
FOOTNOTES:
[284] Nicholson's edition of Wealth of Nations, p. 8.
[285] Bonar's Catalogue of the Library of Adam Smith, p. viii.
[286] Smellie's Life of Smith, p. 297.
[287] Quarterly Review, xxxvi. 200.
[288] Sir J. Sinclair's Correspondence, i. 389.
[289] Stewart's Works, x. 73.
[290] Stewart's Life of Reid, sec. iii.
[291] Sinclair's Old Times and Distant Places, p. 7.