On my way north I stayed a few days with the Gainsboroughs at Exton, near Oakham--my first visit to the little shire of Rutland. A most attractive place, I thought: a charming modern Jacobean {52} house (the ruins of the Elizabethan hall, burnt down a century before, stood close by): beautiful gardens and a nobly-timbered park, in which stands the fine old parish church with its singularly graceful spire. Tennis, _al fresco_ teas, and much music, occupied a few days very agreeably; and I then went on to St. Andrews for my usual autumn sojourn, which I always enjoyed. But my most memorable Scottish visit this autumn was to Abbotsford, which, curiously enough, I had never yet seen, though I had known its owners for thirty years. My grandfather and Sir Walter Scott had been friends for many years: they were planning and building at the same time their respective homes in the western and eastern Lowlands, and often exchanged visits and letters. Here is a little note (undated) in which Sir Walter acknowledged, with an apt Shakespearian reference, a gift of game from Blairquhan:-- My Dear Sir David,-- I thank you much for your kind present. The pheasants arrived in excellent condition, and showing, like Shakespeare's Yeomen, "the mettle of their pasture."[13] When are you and Lady Blair going to take another run down Tweed? Your obliged humble servant, WALTER SCOTT. My father had stayed at Abbotsford as a little boy, before he entered the Navy, and two or three years before Sir Walter's death in 1832. He had not the customary reminiscence of having sat on {53} the great man's knee;[14] but he remembered a beautiful collie which lay outside the study door, and refused to let any one enter in his master's absence. We were all brought up on Scott--his _Tales of a Grandfather_, his novels and poems. My father seemed to know the latter all by heart: he would reel them off (with fine elocution, too) by the hour, and we children loved the stirring music of the Border songs, the _Lady of the Lake_ and the _Lay of the Last Minstrel_, which only in our later and more sophisticated days suggested the answer to a flippant conundrum.[15]