lying down without fear, her candle went not out till she had taken pen
and ink and had called herself to a strict account for the past day. Her
duties and her behaviour to her husband, to her children, to her
servants, and to her many dependants; the things that had tried her
temper, her humility, her patience, her power of self-denial; any
strength and wisdom she had attained to in the government of her tongue
and in shutting her ears from the hearing of evil; as, also, every
ordinary as well as extraordinary providence that had visited her that
day, and how she had been able to recognise it and accept it and take
good out of it. Thus the Lady Boyd prevented the night-watches. When
the women of her own rank sat down to write their promised letters of
gossip and scandal and amusement she sat down to write her diary. 'We
see many things, but we observe nothing,' said Rutherford in a letter to
Lady Kenmure. All around her God had been dealing all that day with Lady
Boyd's neighbours as well as with her, only they had not observed it. But
she had not only an eye to see but a mind and a heart to observe also.
She had a heart that, like the fabled Philosopher's Stone, turned all it
touched and all that touched it immediately to fine gold. Riding home
late one night from a hunting supper-party, young Lord Boyd saw his
mother's candle still burning, and he made bold to knock at her door to
ask why she was not asleep. Without saying a word, she took her son by
the hand and set him down at her table and pointed him to the wet sheet
she had just written. When he had read it he rose, without speaking a
word, and went to his own room, and though that night was never all their
days spoken of to one another, yet all his days Lord Boyd looked back on
that night of the hunt as being the night when his soul escaped from the
snare of the fowler. I much fear the diary is lost, but it would be well
worth the trouble of the owner of Ardross Castle to cause a careful
search to be made for it in the old charter chests of the family.