[Illustration: CHIEFSWOOD] 'Still, as I view each well-known scene, Think what is now, and what hath been, Seems as, to me, of all bereft, Sole friends thy woods and streams were left; And thus I love them better still--.' Of Scott's fascination for Chiefswood, Lockhart has more than one familiar passage. He tells how with his own hands Scott planted creepers brought from the old cottage at Abbotsford around its little rustic porch, and how he was a constant visitor, glad to escape to its quiet retreat when the stir and strain of his own guest-crowded castle were too much for him. Here Scott penned large portions of the 'Pirate' (his writing-bureau may still be seen).[25] Under the great ash, flourishing yet, on the slope to the Rhymer's Glen, William Erskine (afterwards Lord Kinnedder), Scott's most intimate friend, read aloud chapter after chapter from the manuscript before the packet was sealed up for the printer; and here, too, some years later, when much of the gaiety and splendour of Abbotsford had vanished, little Johnnie Lockhart--'Hugh Littlejohn'--who, in a sense, had inspired them, listened to the first narration of those 'Tales of a Grandfather,' which, it is to be hoped, the children of Scotland have not left off studying. John Hugh Lockhart, 'the inheritor of so much genius and sorrow,' the boy who had Sir Walter to tell him stories, was a prime favourite with the Chiefswood circle; the centre of many of its happiest groups; his grandfather's companion in many rare plantation raids and riverside rambles. Born in Edinburgh in 1821, his days were few and evil, however. Smitten with spine disease, he was barely eleven when 'God's finger touched him, and he slept.' Seldom--hardly ever, indeed--does Lockhart unburden his own heart to the reader of the Biography. But there is one pathetic reverie of the Chiefswood days which cannot be passed over--when the crowning sorrow of his life had come, and he was left to bemoan her, 'next to Sir Walter himself, the chief ornament and delight at all those simple meetings, she to whose love I owed my own place in them--Scott's eldest daughter, the one of all his children who in countenance, mind, and manners most resembled himself, and who indeed was as like him in all things as a gentle, innocent woman can ever be to a great man deeply tried and skilled in the struggle and perplexities of active life--she, too, is no more. But enough--and more than I intended.'