Poor Isabella did not always have an easy task. The “multiplication table” gave particular trouble. “I am now going to tell you about the horible and wretched plaege that my multiplication gives me you can’t conceive it—the most Devilish thing is 8 times 8 and 7 times 7; it is what nature itself can’t endure....” Sometimes the Devil gets out of the “multiplication table” and comes even near more sacred ground. “To-day I have been very ungrateful and bad and disobedient, Isabella gave me my writing, I wrote so ill that she took it away and locked it up in her desk where I stood trying to open it till she made me come and read my bible, but I was in a bad homour and red it so carelessly and ill that she took it from me and her blood ran cold, but she never punished me, she is as gental as a lamb to me an ungrateful girl.” Isabella tries the effect of praise:— “Isabella has given me praise for checking my temper, for I was sulky even when she was kneeling an hole hour teaching me to write.” But Marjorie is honest enough to think a whipping would do herself good: “But she never whipes me, so that I thinke I should be the better of it, and the next time that I behave ill, I think she should do it, for she never does it, but she is very indulgent to me, but I am very ungrateful to her.” It may have been at Ravelston (where “I am enjoying nature’s fresh air, the birds are singing sweetly, the calf doth frisk and play, and nature shows her glorious face, the sun shines through the trees”) that Marjorie first saw and conquered Sir Walter. For all readers of _Waverley_ will remember how deeply its author loved the old house and garden, where he had played as a boy. The conquest was completed when Marjorie returned to Edinburgh, and by all accounts it was not her beauty that worked the charm. As Marjorie herself says, “I am very strong and robust and not of the delicate sex, nor of the fair, but of the deficient in looks,” and poor Isa Keith is quite concerned about her plainness: “She is grown excessively fat and strong,” she writes about this time to Kirkcaldy, “but I cannot say she is in great beauty, as she has lost two front teeth, and her continued propensity to laugh exhibits the defect rather strongly.” But in the eyes of Sir Walter, she was better than beautiful: “She’s the most extraordinary creature I ever met with,” he told Mrs. Keith, “and her repeating of Shakespeare overpowers me as nothing else does.”