Of all Bute's contemporaries at the great school, there were perhaps only two with whom he struck up a real and close friendship. One was Adam Hay Gordon of Avochie (a cadet of the Tweeddale family), who was with him afterwards at Christ Church, and was one of his few intimate associates there. The intimacy was not continued into later years, but the memory of it remained. "I heard with sorrow," Bute recorded in his diary on July 12, 1894, "of the death of one of my dearest friends, Addle Hay Gordon. Though at Harrow together, and very intimate at college, we had not met for many years. In my Oxford days I several times stayed in Edinburgh with him and his parents, in Rutland Square. We were as brothers."[4] An even more intimate, and more lasting, friendship was that with George E. Sneyd, who was at Westcott's house with Bute, and who afterwards became his private secretary, married his cousin, Miss Elizabeth Stuart (granddaughter of Admiral Lord George Stuart) in 1880, and died in the same year as Adam Hay Gordon. "It is difficult to say," wrote Bute in January, 1894, "what this loss is to me. He had been an intimate friend ever since we were at Westcott's big house at Harrow--one of my few at all, the most intimate (unless Addle Hay Gordon) and the most trusted I ever had. He had a very important place in my will. For these two I had prayed by name regularly at every Mass I have heard for many, many years." {24} A school contemporary, who records Bute's close friendship with George Sneyd, mentions (as do others) his fancy for keeping Ligurian bees in his tiny study-bedroom. "My only recollection of his room at Harrow, where I once visited him," writes Sir Herbert Maxwell, "is of an arrangement whereby bees entered from without into a hive within the room, where their proceedings could be watched." A brother of Sir Redvers Buller, who boarded in the adjoining house, has recorded that "Bute's bees" were a perfect nuisance to him, as they had a way of flying in at his window instead of their own, and disturbing him at his studies or other employments. [Sidenote: 1863, Harrow school prizes]