X. CROSSMOUNT 425

he could sing French songs about the Earthly Paradise; and Alec Wedderburn, because he could swim into tarns and fetch out water-lilies for me, like a water-spaniel.¹ And I never expected that they should care much for me, but only that they should read my books; and looking back, I believe they liked and like me, nearly as well as if I hadn’t written any.

196. First then, of this Love’s Meinie² of my own age, or under it, William Macdonald took to me; and got me to promise, that autumn, to come to him at Crossmount, where it was his evangelical duty to do some shooting in due season.

I went into Scotland by Dunbar; saw again Loch Leven, Glen Farg, Rose Terrace, and the Inch of Perth; and went on, pensive enough, by Killiecrankie, to the clump of pines which sheltered my friend’s lodge from the four winds of the wilderness.

After once walking up Schehallion with him and his keepers, with such entertainment as I could find in the mewing and shrieking of some seventy or eighty grey hares, who were brought down in bags and given to the poorer tenantry; and forming final opinion that the poorer tenantry might better have been permitted to find the stock of their hare-soup for themselves, I forswore further fashionable amusement, and set myself, when the days were fine, to the laborious eradication of a crop of thistles, which had been too successfully grown by northern agriculture in one of the best bits of unboggy ground by the Tummel.

197. I have carelessly omitted noticing till now, that the ambitions in practical gardening, of which the germs,

¹ [“What happened,” says Mr. Wedderburn, “was this. Collingwood and I were at Brantwood one summer, not long after a visit to Oxford of Princess Alice of Hesse, for whom Ruskin had promised to paint a water-lily. One Sunday afternoon we drove with Ruskin up to a tarn, where water-lilies grew. But those within reach were poor flowers, while those out in the middle looked (and were) fine. Collingwood and I tossed which of us should strip and swim out to them. I won, jumped in, and brought back-I think, with their stalks in my mouth-some of the lilies, Collingwood’s readiness and mine much delighting Ruskin.”]

² [See above, i. § 31 (p. 30).]

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