To Lord Stair belonged the credit of finding one who was approved of by
Lady Stair as an entirely suitable match. David Dunbar, younger, of
Baldoon in Wigtonshire, a solid young man with a good, solid fortune,
was the son-in-law of their choice; and Lady Stair found no difficulty
in getting him to see that her beautiful daughter was undoubtedly the
right wife for him.
Contemporary history furnishes us with no description of Andrew, Lord
Rutherfurd, but we learn from the Edinburgh printer who furnished the
Dunbar family with an enthusiastic elegy on the death of David Dunbar of
Baldoon that apparently he was a little red-faced man, ardently keen
about agricultural pursuits, and deeply interested in the breeding of
cattle and horses. Moreover, he was a student, well versed in modern
history and in architecture, and with a good head for arithmetic (did he
add up the figures of the fortune of Janet Dalrymple entirely to his own
satisfaction?), and he had the additional amazing distinction chronicled
by his eulogising biographer--
"He learned the French, be't spoken to his praise,
In very little more than forty days."
It is impossible to tell how much of the love story of the girl whom he
proposed to make his wife was known to young Baldoon. Possibly he had
had it lightly sketched to him by Lady Stair's skilled hand, as a mere
girlish fancy, likely to be very soon past and already entirely on the
wane. In any case, Baldoon evidently saw no more difficulties in the way
of his nuptials than did Lord and Lady Stair. The fact that the bride
"canna thole the man" must ever be a purely secondary consideration in
such matrimonial arrangements. Meantime the unhappy bride-elect had the
scheme laid before her, and in spite of her sobbing protests, was
commanded to conform to the wishes of her parents.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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