A happy Xmas to you. Mine is comfortable, if not merry nor ideal. Let me say in black and white that I mean to pay for the meat and wine ordered by the doctor for the poor woman you mention.... Money I cannot send. I have little more than £100 to spend myself. My allowance is £2000, and I have overdrawn £1630, with a draft for £1000 coming due. I am trying to raise the wind here: it seems absurd that I should be "hard up," but it is a long story. I am only sorry that the offerings I should make at this time to the "Little Child of Bethlehem" are not procurable. Ever yours most truly, BUTE. [Sidenote: 1865, At Dumfries House] Bute had now finally left Galloway House, which had been his holiday residence during his Harrow days; and his home when not at Oxford was at Dumfries House, his Ayrshire seat, then in the occupation of Sir James and Lady Edith Fergusson. "I saw a good deal of him when he was living at Dumfries House under the tutelage of Sir James Fergusson," writes one who had known him from {33} childhood. "He used to come down to the smoking-room at night arrayed in a gorgeous garment of pale blue and gold: I think he said he had had it made on the pattern of a saintly bishop's vestment in a stained glass window of the Harrow Chapel. Sir James was anxious to make a sportsman of Bute, and bought a hunter or two for him. I remember his coming out one day with Lord Eglinton's hounds, but I never saw him take the field again." The tyro, as a matter of fact, got a toss in essaying to jump a hedge; and so mortified was he by this public discomfiture that he not only never again appeared in the hunting-field, but he never quite forgave Sir James for being the indirect cause of the misadventure. Miss Skene not only acted to some extent as Bute's almoner during his Oxford days (it is fair to say that the "hard-up" condition alluded to in the above letter was due at least as much to his lavish almsgiving as to any personal extravagance), but was his adviser in regard to other matters. "Mrs. Leighton [wife of the Warden of All Souls] has invited me," runs one of his notes, "to come and meet a Scottish bishop (St. Andrews) at dinner, and asks me in the same letter to give 'out of my abundance' a cheque to enlarge the Penitentiary chapel. Now I dislike Scots Episcopalian bishops (not individually but officially), their genesis having been unblushingly Erastian, and their present status in Scotland being schismatic and dissenting; and my 'abundance' at present consists of a heavy overdraft at the bank. Read and forward the enclosed reply, unless you think the lady will take offence, which can hardly be."