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inadequate to give their children a quick start in life. What really set this grammar school apart was that it was coeducational, one of the first in Upper Canada. At the risk of reading too much into it, Macdonald’s coeducational experience, reinforced by the female-centred household he grew up in, may explain one of the qualities that set him apart from most men of his day—and of a good many still. In the company of women, Macdonald was always wholly at his ease. He was never awkward or shy or predatory with them. He could flirt and play the gallant, but he never patronized women.
    As is common enough, Macdonald was his own principal teacher. He read omnivorously—history, biographies, politics, poetry, geography. His most remarked-upon scholastic skill was his handwriting—clear, large, even and fluid. (His letters would be a delight to later scholars.) Cruickshank was always proud to show Macdonald’s compositions to new students, and he kept them for years afterwards as models of penmanship.
    Macdonald’s preparation for life ended in his fifteenth year. From then on, he began to live it. But he’d already learned a great deal about life’s essence—the ways and the whys of how people behave.

 
    THREE
    The Right Time to Be a Scot

    A man’s a man for a’ that. Robert Burns
    J ohn A. Macdonald placed his first foot on life’s ladder by apprenticing to an established Kingston lawyer. To qualify for this post, he had first to go to Toronto, to the offices of the Law Society of Upper Canada, and, before a panel of benchers, sit an exam that involved some Latin and some mathematics. He passed, paid the fee of fifteen pounds, and returned to Kingston as he had come, by steamboat. There was then no formal training for lawyers or any law degree. Now just short of sixteen, he worked long days as a law clerk, running errands and putting newly written letters through a letter press to squeeze out copies on onion-skin paper before the ink was dry; at night he crammed through textbooks.
    To become a clerk to an established lawyer constituted a substantial step forward. The one taken by Macdonald was more like a leap. No matter how junior his post, he had gained entry to what was probably the most sought-after legal premises in Kingston—the office of George Mackenzie. Although onlythirty-five, Mackenzie was already one of the town’s most successful and highly regarded lawyers.
    The crucial introduction to Mackenzie had come to Macdonald as a gift from the family’s patron, Colonel Macpherson. Mackenzie would also have been well aware of the quality of the education his clerk had received at Reverend Cruickshank’s school. A couple of years later, Macdonald’s budding legal career benefited from his being asked by another relative, Lowther Macpherson, to fill in temporarily, with Mackenzie’s permission, in his Prince Edward County law office while he himself was away trying to recover from an illness; Macdonald thereby gained management experience at the earliest age. While in Kingston, he made his first adult friendships, most particularly with a bright and attractive young man called Charles Stuart. The preceptor of St. Andrew’s Church there took a liking to Macdonald and, while teasing him as “a free thinker of the worst kind,” engaged him in biblical discussions that gave the young law clerk valuable practice in how best to organize his arguments. Moreover, around this time, Hugh Macdonald was rescued from his uninterrupted business failures by a relative, Francis Harper, who slipped him into a secure if lowly sinecure post as a clerk in Kingston’s newly established Commercial Bank of the Midland District.
    To all these individuals who enabled Macdonald to make his first career steps a good deal more quickly than he would have otherwise, and to others like them who later provided similar assistance as his trot quickened into a