Field Meetings. 347 



here tea was serxed under the trees at the side of the house, 

 Mr and Miss Carlyle, tlie present tenants of the farm, and 

 Miss Carlyle Aitken, Dumfries, who accompanied the 

 visitors, having- made excellent arrang-ements for their recep- 

 tion. The story of the \ears which Carlyle and his wife 

 spent at this isolated moorland farm has often been told. It 

 had been inherited by Mrs Carlyle from her father, and they 

 went there after having spent the first eighteen months of 

 their married life in Edinburgh. The step, says Carlyle, had 

 been " founded on irrefragable considerations of health, 

 finance, etc., etc., unknown to bystanders, and could not be 

 forborne or altered." The house is certainly an exceedingly 

 lonely one, and it occasioned much surprise to their friends 

 when they decided to take up their abode there, and even 

 yet it is a frequent custom to speak as though their residence 

 at Craigenputtock was somewhat of an unsuccessful experi- 

 ment. Jeffrey, who visited them twice while they were 

 there, thought Carlyle a fool for leaving Edinburgh for such 

 moorland solitudes, and others shared that opinion. But all 

 such opinions appear to have been wide of the mark. 

 Carlyle long afterwards described Craigenputtock as " the 

 field of endless nobleness and beautiful talent and virtue in 

 Her who is now gone ; also of good industry, and many 

 loving and blessed thoughts in myself, while living there by 

 her side." .And Mrs Carlyle, when they had already been 

 living four years at the place, said to one of her correspon- 

 dents : — " I have everything here my heart desires, that I 

 could have ^anywhere else, except society, and even that 

 deprivation is not to be considered wholly an evil ; if people 

 we like and take pleasure in do not come about us here as in 

 London, it is thankfully to be remembered that here ' the 

 wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest.' 

 If the knocker make no sound for weeks together, it is so 

 much the better for my ner\es. My Husband is as good 

 company as reasonable mortal could desire. Every fair 

 morning we ride on horse-back for an hour before break- 

 fast;" and so forth, giving a description of how their days 

 were spent. Carlyle's expression of his appreciation of the 

 place was not confined to prose, as he made Craigenputtock 



