Note 54 — Chapter V · James Watt—Lineage and Birthplace—Boyhood and Apprenticeship.

Some of her neighbours thought her stately and unbending, and that she affected a superior style of living. In the ‘Memorials of Watt,’ by the late George Williamson, Esq., Greenock, are to be found many curious and interesting details as to the Watt family; collected partly from tradition and partly from local records. Of Mrs. Watt’s “superior style of living,” compared with the custom of the period, the following anecdote is given:—“One of the author’s informants on such points, a venerable lady in her eightieth year, was wont to speak of the worthy baillie’s wife with much characteristic interest and animation. As illustrative of the internal economy of the family, the old lady related an occasion on which she had spent an evening, when a girl, at Mrs. Watt’s house, and remembered expressing with much naïveté to her mother on returning home, her childish surprise that ‘Mrs. Watt had two lighted candles on the table.’ Among these and other reminiscences of her youth, our venerable informant described James Watt’s mother, in her expressive Doric, as ‘a braw, braw woman—none now to be seen like her.’” p. 128–9.