Robert Chambers was a very keen sportsman, who fortunately did not require much practice to keep up his game. He held championships in golf and bowling. He was too ardent a naturalist and ornithologist to care for shooting, but he was an expert angler. He was also a born actor and mimic, and used to keep a Green Room in roars by "taking off" any of "the profession" called for, and I never heard a better ventriloquist. He adored music, and played the flute well. As a platform speaker he was extremely fluent and perfectly at ease.
His indifference to money resulted in his never having a penny in his pocket at night, no matter how much he took with him in the morning, and one of my tasks was to prevent his being fleeced by those who lay in wait for him. He took any amount of trouble over impecunious and incompetent authors, and constantly re-wrote their work for them in order to make it fit for publication. He was a unique editor, and his labors in the cause of charity were strenuous, secret, and, I fear, rather indiscriminate.
During this period of my life, the head of the house, William Chambers, was still living, with his quaint old wife, in the West End of Edinburgh. William, who had survived his more versatile brother, Robert (my grandfather), was a little shriveled-up old man, with a dry and severe manner. Most people were afraid of him, few liked him, but I got on with him famously. I have always been extremely proud of the fact that he rose from nothing to great wealth. There must be something fine in a man, who, as a lad, rose at four a. m. to read classics to an intelligent baker, whilst the batch of bread was being baked, and who gladly accepted as payment a copper or a roll.
William and Robert Chambers had left their widowed mother to fend for themselves. The family was at the lowest financial ebb. Much money had been spent on the French refugees who flocked into Scotland in 1810, and there was nothing to spare now. We were originally French, like so very many of the old Scotch families. The first of us in history is recorded as Guillaume de la Chaumbre, who, as the most prominent man in Peebles, signed the Ragman Roll in 1296. My people had always lived in the dales of the Tweed, so very appropriately I married a man called Tweedale.