In the fated year I came to live with my father and mother at
Kinnaird, above Pitlochry. Then I walked on the red moors and by
the side of the golden burn; the rude, pure air of our mountains
inspirited, if it did not inspire us, and my wife and I projected a
joint volume of logic stories, for which she wrote 'The Shadow on
the Bed,' and I turned out 'Thrawn Janet,' and a first draft of
'The Merry Men.' I love my native air, but it does not love me;
and the end of this delightful period was a cold, a fly-blister,
and a migration by Strathairdle and Glenshee to the Castleton of
Braemar.
There it blew a good deal and rained in a proportion; my native air
was more unkind than man's ingratitude, and I must consent to pass
a good deal of my time between four walls in a house lugubriously
known as the Late Miss McGregor's Cottage. And now admire the
finger of predestination. There was a schoolboy in the Late Miss
McGregor's Cottage, home from the holidays, and much in want of
'something craggy to break his mind upon.' He had no thought of
literature; it was the art of Raphael that received his fleeting
suffrages; and with the aid of pen and ink and a shilling box of
water colours, he had soon turned one of the rooms into a picture
gallery. My more immediate duty towards the gallery was to be
showman; but I would sometimes unbend a little, join the artist (so
to speak) at the easel, and pass the afternoon with him in a
generous emulation, making coloured drawings.
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