It must have been a good change for this art
critic to be the playmate of Mary Macdonald, their gardener's
daughter at Barjarg, and to sup with her family on potatoes and
milk; and Fleeming himself attached some value to this early and
friendly experience of another class.
His education, in the formal sense, began at Jedburgh. Thence he
went to the Edinburgh Academy, where he was the classmate of Tait
and Clerk Maxwell, bore away many prizes, and was once unjustly
flogged by Rector Williams. He used to insist that all his bad
schoolfellows had died early, a belief amusingly characteristic of
the man's consistent optimism. In 1846 the mother and son
proceeded to Frankfort-on-the-Main, where they were soon joined by
the father, now reduced to inaction and to play something like
third fiddle in his narrow household. The emancipation of the
slaves had deprived them of their last resource beyond the half-pay
of a captain; and life abroad was not only desirable for the sake
of Fleeming's education, it was almost enforced by reasons of
economy.
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