MY DEAR LORD DUKE,--I am just honored with your Grace's of the 27th. The posts, which are as cross as pie-crust, have occasioned some delay. Depend on our attending at Bowhill on the 20th, and staying over the show. I have written to Adam Ferguson, who will come with a whoop and a hollo. So will the Ballantynes--flageolet[77] and all--for the festival, and they shall be housed at Abbotsford. I have an inimitably good songster in the person of Terence Magrath, who teaches my girls. He beats almost all whom I have ever heard attempt Moore's songs, and I can easily cajole him also out to Abbotsford for a day or two. In jest or earnest, I never heard a better singer in a room, though his voice is not quite full enough for a concert; and for an after-supper song, he almost equals Irish Johnstone.[78] [Footnote 77: The _flageolet_ alludes to Mr. Alexander Ballantyne, the third of the brothers--a fine musician, and a most amiable and modest man, never connected with Scott in any business matters, but always much his favorite in private.] [Footnote 78: Mr. Magrath has now been long established in his native city of Dublin. His musical excellence was by no means the only merit that attached Scott to his society while he remained in Edinburgh.] Trade of every kind is recovering, and not a loom idle {p.194} in Glasgow. The most faithful respects of this family attend the Ladies and all at Drumlanrig. I ever am your Grace's truly obliged and grateful Walter SCOTT. Given from my Castle of Grawacky, this second day of the month called October, One Thousand Eight Hundred and Seventeen Years. There is a date nearly as long as the letter. I hope we shall attack the foxes at Bowhill. I will hazard Maida. We have some allusions to this Bowhill party in another letter; the first of several which I shall now insert according to their dates, leaving them, with a few marginal notes, to tell out the story of 1817:-- TO DANIEL TERRY, ESQ., LONDON. ABBOTSFORD, October 24, 1817.