I have spoken of the vacant house--family gone: The young Sir Walter Scott, of the British army, and heir to the estate--was at that date (1845) absent in the Indies; and only two years thereafter died at sea on his voyage home. Charles Scott, the only brother of the younger Sir Walter, died in 1841.[22] Miss Anne Scott, the only unmarried daughter of the author of _Waverley_, died--worn-out with tenderest care of mother and father, and broken-hearted--in 1833. Her only sister, Mrs. (Sophia Scott) Lockhart, died in 1837. Her oldest son--John Hugh, familiarly known as “Hugh Little John”--the crippled boy, for whom had been written the _Tales of a Grandfather_, and the darling of the two households upon Tweed-side--died in 1831. I cannot forbear quoting here a charming little memorial of him, which, within the present year, has appeared in Mr. Lang’s _Life of Lockhart_. “A figure as of one of Charles Lamb’s dream-children haunts the little beck at Chiefswood, and on that haugh at Abbotsford, where Lockhart read the manuscript of the _Fortunes of Nigel_, fancy may see ‘Hugh Little John,’ ‘throwing stones into the burn,’ for so he called the Tweed. While children study the _Tales of a Grandfather_, he does not want friends in this world to remember and envy the boy who had Sir Walter to tell him stories.”--P. 75, vol. ii. A younger son of Lockhart, Walter Scott by name, became, at the death of the younger Walter Scott, inheritor of all equities in the landed estate upon Tweed-side, and the proper Laird of Abbotsford. His story is a short and a sad one; he was utterly unworthy, and died almost unbefriended at Versailles in January, 1853. His father, J. G. Lockhart, acknowledging a picture of this son, under date of 1843, in a letter addressed to his daughter Charlotte--(later Mrs. Hope-Scott,[23] and mother of the present proprietress of Abbotsford), writes with a grief he could not cover:-- “I am not sorry to have it by me, though it breaks my heart to recall the date. It is of the sweet, innocent, happy boy, home for Sunday from Cowies [his school].… Oh, God! how soon that day became clouded, and how dark its early close! Well, I suppose there is another world; if not, sure this is a blunder.”