My last letter was written in Scotland, Cupar Fife. I shall
always remember that quiet little place where the red-headed
Guthries,--they must have been red-headed from eating so much
porridge,--tilled the earth and brought up sheep in the way
they should go. The village seems as much cut off from the rest
of the world as though it were surrounded by sea, and every
small thing that happens excites it. The man who kept the Inn
that I stayed in (feeling frightfully lonely, though really
very much interested) had words with his good woman one night
and the rights and wrongs of the perfectly private matter have
since divided all the inhabitants. Best friends don't speak and
the minister is going to preach about the affair next Sunday. I
saw the house the old Guthries lived in and was taken all over
it by a kind old soul to whom father gave more money than
she thought existed when he was there. Gee! but my
great-grandfather must have had precious little ambition to
live his whole life in a little hole like that. In most of the
rooms the beds were in small alcoves and needed climbing up to
like bunks. Mrs. McAlister, who lives there now with her
married daughter and her seven children, sleeps in one of these
fug-holes in the kitchen. Think of it! And she said that the
floor swarms with beetles--she can hear them crackling about in
the night. All the same, by Jove! this primitive living makes
men. I can see from whom father got his grit and determination.
I was glad to find myself in London. I've only been here for a
night or two at various times and it's a wilderness to me. I
lose myself every time I go out and have to ask Bobbies how to
get back. Topping chaps, these Bobbies. They mostly look like
gentlemen and are awfully glad to get a laugh. To hear them
talk about the 'Aymarket, Piccadilly Surcuss, Wart'loo Plaice
and Westminister Habbey first of all puzzles one and then fills
one with joy. As to the Abbey,--oh, Gee! but isn't it away
beyond words! I spent a whole day wandering about among the
graves of its mighty dead, and finally when I got to the end of
the cloister and came upon that small, square, open space where
the grass grows so green and sparrows play about, I was glad
there was nobody to see me except the maid-servant of one of
the minor Canons who was taking in the milk for afternoon tea.
There are one or two vacant niches among the shrines of men who
have done things and moved things on, in which I should like to
stand (not looking a bit like myself in stone) when I have done
my job, and if I were an Englishman I should work for it. As it
is, I shall work for you and all you mean to me, my baby, and
that's even a higher privilege.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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