It was about this time also that Scott’s martial ardour and patriotism found vent in helping to organise the Scottish Light-horse Volunteers, in preparation for the expected French Invasion. When, therefore, in his twenty-sixth year, he brought home to Edinburgh the little half-French bride to whose dark prettiness and novel vivacity he had fallen a victim whilst a fellow-visitor at a watering-place, she found a warm welcome awaiting her from a large and various circle of friends, all devoted to her young husband, and sharing with him one or other of his enthusiasms,--military or literary, antiquarian or sporting. Among these must not be forgotten Skene of Rubislaw, whose friendship with Scott began in a mutual love for German literature, and ended only with death. Scott took his young wife first to lodgings in George Street, his house at 10 South Castle Street not being quite ready; and the following summer he hired that first and humblest of those three country homes near Edinburgh where his happiest days were spent, a pretty cottage, with a garden and a paddock, at Lasswade. It is still standing and unchanged. Here and at Castle Street the young people lived comfortably on their combined incomes for many years, and made themselves and their friends happy with much simple and inexpensive hospitality. At Lasswade it was that they formed friendships with the neighbouring great houses of Melville and Buccleuch; that they were near--as the country counts near--to Scott’s old friends the Clerks of Penicuik and Tytlers of Woodhouselee, and Henry Mackenzie, the “Man of Feeling,” who lived at Auchendinny. And it was at the Lasswade cottage that Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy arrived before breakfast on the morning of September 17, 1803. Scott was then writing the _Lay of the Last Minstrel_, and read the first four cantos to Wordsworth. He walked with his guests to Roslin, and afterwards met them for the famous days in the Border country, where he was Sheriff. Hogg’s first celebrated visit was paid at Castle Street. It was in the drawing-room there that the Ettrick Shepherd, feeling sure he “could never do wrong to copy the lady of the house,” lay down at full length on the sofa opposite hers. It was here that he “dined heartily and drank freely and, by jest, anecdote, and song, afforded plentiful merriment.” It was here that, as the hour grew later, his enthusiasm showed itself in a descending warmth of appellations for his host, who, first “Mr. Scott,” became “Shirra,” and then “Scott,” “Walter,” and, finally, “Wattie”; and the “plentiful merriment” must have reached its culmination when Mrs. Scott was addressed as “Charlotte.”