yours? Bannockburn does not appear to have done much for your city's elbow room, whatever it may have done for the "Liberty's in every blow!" that you sing about.'
At breakfast he enquired of my mother about the arrangements among the tenants for the using of the 'green,' and seemed pleased to hear that usually little or no misunderstanding arose over the allocation of space and respective washing days. 'I have always found it so,' he said, 'respecting the use of common property when there is reasonable equality of need and where self-interest is disciplined by established custom. I don't suppose there ever was much bother in the olden days among the village folk respecting the use of common land or any of the old parish possessions, so long as the people were mostly neighbours and pretty nearly on the same social level; and even nowadays in the English villages the people get on in a much more friendly way over their public property rights than over their private property concerns.'
My mother was becoming accustomed to entertaining Socialist agitators whom her son invited home with him, often without forewarning her of his intention; but like so many Scottish, and especially Highland hostesses, she was somewhat shy of new guests, particularly when they were persons of public fame or visitors from other countries. Though she did not at that period know much about Socialism, except that, like Irish Land Leaguism and Atheism, it was regarded as a highly disreputable and dangerous doctrine, she respected and welcomed whomsoever her son brought to her door.
Such diverse personalities as Andreas Scheu, Leo Melliet, Lawrence Gronlund, the Rev. Dr. Glasse, Prince Kropotkin, Stepniak, Henry George, and Edward Carpenter had thus sat at her board, and each had presented a fresh problem of hospitality to her, so concerned was she that they should be 'welcome' in every sense of the word. But with Morris, as with the others, she was soon wholly at ease. His unaffected courtesy and simplicity of manners
