6 A HUNDRED YEARS 



to have heard of the visit to that charming island was 

 that I there first showed a love of music, which has 

 continued all through my life. I was told that when a 

 brass band played I almost jumped out of my mother's 

 arms. A friend of my father, a Colonel Lecouteur, gave 

 a dinner, and the dessert consisted of pears only, there 

 being thirty dishes, each containing a different variety. 

 So it seems that their culture was pretty well advanced 

 even as far back as 1842. 



And now my memory of the events that happened for 

 a couple of years is more or less vague, and I can depend 

 only on what I was told by others. Soon after our 

 arrival in England my father became very ill, and, 

 according to the stupid practice of doctors in those days, 

 he was bled in the arm, erysipelas set in, and he died in 

 the course of a few days. His remains were taken north 

 by sea, from London to Invergorden, by my mother 

 and her brother and sister, to be buried in the family 

 burying-place in the old ruined Priory of Beauly. I was 

 just a year old when this calamity happened, and conse- 

 quently can remember nothing of the voyage north or 

 anything else for some time after. But subsequent 

 voyages of a like kind when I was four or five years old 

 made impressions on me which have never been for- 

 gotten. How well I remember, as though it were only 

 yesterday, a horrible voyage from Invergordon to London 

 in a kind of paddle-boat, which lasted nine whole days ! 

 We called at every small port along the Banffshire and 

 Aberdeenshire coasts for dead meat for the London 

 market. Stacks of it were piled up on the deck, and 

 consisted chiefly of dead pigs. By way of amusing me. 



