To-day in Glasgow my father went off on some business, and my
mother and I wandered about for two hours. We had lunch together,
and were very merry over what the people at the restaurant would
think of us - mother and son they could not suppose us to be.

SATURDAY. - And to-day it came - warmth, sunlight, and a strong,
hearty living wind among the trees. I found myself a new being.
My father and I went off a long walk, through a country most
beautifully wooded and various, under a range of hills. You should
have seen one place where the wood suddenly fell away in front of
us down a long, steep hill between a double row of trees, with one
small fair-haired child framed in shadow in the foreground; and
when we got to the foot there was the little kirk and kirkyard of
Irongray, among broken fields and woods by the side of the bright,
rapid river. In the kirkyard there was a wonderful congregation of
tombstones, upright and recumbent on four legs (after our Scotch
fashion), and of flat-armed fir-trees. One gravestone was erected
by Scott (at a cost, I learn, of 70 pounds) to the poor woman who
served him as heroine in the HEART OF MIDLOTHIAN, and the
inscription in its stiff, Jedediah Cleishbotham fashion is not
without something touching. We went up the stream a little further
to where two Covenanters lie buried in an oakwood; the tombstone
(as the custom is) containing the details of their grim little
tragedy in funnily bad rhyme, one verse of which sticks in my
memory:-


'We died, their furious rage to stay,
Near to the kirk of Iron-gray.'