GLEN AMONG THE MOORS—­MARGOT’S ADVENTURE WITH A TRAMP—­THE SHEPHERD BOY—­MEMORIES AND ESCAPADES—­LAURA AND MARGOT; PROPOSALS OF MARRIAGE—­NEW MEN FRIENDS—­LAURA ENGAGED; PROPOSAL IN THE DUSK—­MARGOT’S ACCIDENT IN HUNTING FIELD—­LAURA’S PREMONITION OF DEATH IN CHILD-BIRTH—­LAURA’S WILL

My home, Glen, is on the border of Peeblesshire and Selkirkshire, sixteen miles from Abbotsford and thirty from Edinburgh.  It was designed on the lines of Glamis and Castle Fraser, in what is called Scottish baronial style.  I well remember the first shock I had when some one said:  “I hate turrets and tin men on the top of them!” It unsettled me for days.  I had never imagined that anything could be more beautiful than Glen.  The classical style of Whittingehame—­and other fine places of the sort—­appeared to me better suited for municipal buildings; the beams and flint in Cheshire reminded me of Earl’s Court; and such castles as I had seen looked like the pictures of the Rhine on my blotting-book.  I was quite ignorant and “Scottish baronial” thrilled me.

What made Glen really unique was not its architecture but its situation.  The road by which you approached it was a cul-de-sac and led to nothing but moors.  This—­and the fact of its being ten miles from a railway station—­gave it security in its wildness.  Great stretches of heather swept down to the garden walls; and, however many heights you climbed, moor upon moor rose in front of you.

Evan Charteris [Footnote:  The Hon. Evan Charteris] said that my hair was biography:  as it is my only claim to beauty, I would like to think that this is true, but the hills at Glen are my real biography.

Nature inoculates its lovers from its own culture; sea, downs and moors produce a different type of person.  Shepherds, fishermen and poachers are a little like what they contemplate and, were it possible to ask the towns to tell us whom they find most untamable, I have not a doubt that they would say, those who are born on the moors.

I married late—­at the age of thirty—­and spent all my early life at Glen.  I was a child of the heather and quite untamable.  After my sister Laura Lyttelton died, my brother Eddy and I lived alone with my parents for nine years at Glen.

When he was abroad shooting big game, I spent long days out of doors, seldom coming in for lunch.  Both my pony and my hack were saddled from 7 a.m., ready for me to ride, every day of my life.  I wore the shortest of tweed skirts, knickerbockers of the same stuff, top-boots, a covert-coat and a coloured scarf round my head.  I was equipped with a book, pencils, cigarettes and food.  Every shepherd and poacher knew me; and I have often shared my “piece” with them, sitting in the heather near the red burns, or sheltered from rain in the cuts and quarries of the open road.

After my first great sorrow—­the death of my sister Laura—­I was suffocated in the house and felt I had to be out of doors from morning till night.