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