But in the evening she grew much better, and was like other people, only that she would constantly walk in and out of the dark ante-chambers playing on a concertina, which, as she wore a tiara of pearls and turquoises, had a very odd effect in the half light; and then at eleven o'clock at night she would put on her bonnet and cloak and go off for a walk by herself in the woods. Charming Miss Minnie Fletcher of Saltoun is here. She told me that—
"Sir David Brewster and his daughter went to stay with the Stirlings of Kippenross. In the night Miss Brewster was amazed by being awakened by her father coming into her room and saying, 'My dear, don't be alarmed, but I really cannot stay in my room. It may be very foolish and nervous, but there are such odd noises, such extraordinary groanings and moanings, that I positively cannot bear it any longer, and you must let me stay here. Don't disturb yourself; I shall easily sleep on the sofa.'
"Miss Brewster thought her father very silly, but there he stayed till morning, when he slipped away to his own room to dress, so as not to be found when the servant came to call his daughter. When the maid came she said, 'Pray, ma'am, how long are you going to stay in this house?' Miss Brewster was surprised, and said she did not know. 'Because, ma'am, if you are going to stay, I am sorry to say I must leave you. I like you very much, ma'am, and I shall be sorry to go, but I would do anything rather than again go through all I suffered last night; such awful groanings and moanings and such fearful noises I can never endure again.' Miss Brewster was very much annoyed and laughed at the maid, who nevertheless continued firm in her decision.
"In the afternoon Miss Brewster had a headache, and at length it became so bad that she was obliged to leave the dinner-table and go up to her room. At the head of the stairs she saw a woman—a large woman in a chintz gown, leaning against the banisters. She took her for the housekeeper, and said, 'I am going to my room: will you be so kind as to send my maid to me?' The woman did not answer, but bowed her head three times and then pointed to a door in the passage and went downstairs. Miss Brewster went to her room, and after waiting an hour in vain for her maid, she undressed and went to bed. When the maid came up, she asked why she had not come before, and said she had sent the housekeeper for her. 'How very odd,' said the maid, 'because I have been sitting with the housekeeper the whole time.' Miss Brewster then described the person she had seen, upon which the maid gave a shriek and said, 'Oh, then you have seen the ghost.' The maid was in such a state of terror, that when Mrs. Stirling came up to inquire after her headache, Miss Brewster asked her about the woman she had seen, when, to her surprise, Mrs. Stirling looked quite agonised, and said, 'Oh, then there is more misery in store for me. You do not know what that ghost has been to me all through my married life.' She then made Miss Brewster promise not to tell the persons who slept in the room pointed at, that theirs was the room. It was a Major and Mrs. Wedderburn who slept there. Mrs. Stirling and Miss Brewster then both wrote out accounts of what had happened and signed and sealed them. Before the year was out, they heard that the Wedderburns were both killed in the Indian Mutiny."
"Winton Castle, Sept. 8.—My visit here has been very pleasant indeed. The Speaker and Lady Charlotte Denison came on Tuesday afternoon with the Belhavens. He is a fine-looking elderly man, with a wonderful fund of agreeable small-talk. Lady Charlotte[294] is very refined, quite unaffected, and very pretty still: they are both most kind to me. Miss Fletcher has been here all the time to help Lady Ruthven, for whom it is well that she has such a kind, pleasant greatniece only a mile off, to come and help her to amuse all her guests, as she has had fifty-six parties of people staying in the house in the last year. We saw a large party of the great-great nephews and nieces of Lady Ruthven and Lady Belhaven on Wednesday, when we went to spend the afternoon at Lord Elcho's. It is a fine place, Amisfield—a huge red stone house in a large park close to the town of Haddington, where there is a beautiful old cathedral, but in ruins, like all the best Scotch churches. Lady Elcho[295] has the stately refinement of a beautiful Greek statue. Her children are legion, the two eldest boys very handsome and pleasant. We went over the house, with old tapestry, &c., to be seen, and the gardens with fine cedars, and then all Lord Wemyss's twenty-four race horses were brought out in turn to be exercised round the courtyard and admired: after which we had Scotch tea—scones, cakes, apricot-jam, &c.
"I have made rather friends with John Gordon,[296] a younger brother of Lord Aberdeen, who has been staying here. He is a second Charlie Wood in character, though only eighteen, and I have seldom seen any one I liked as well on short acquaintance. His family are all supposed to be dreadfully shy, but he seems to be an exception.
"Yesterday Lady Belhaven and Lady Ruthven went to Edinburgh, and I stayed with Miss Fletcher, and walked with her in the afternoon to Saltoun, where we had tea with Lady Charlotte and saw the curiosities. Lady Charlotte Fletcher[297] said:—
"'The French royal family were often here at Saltoun when they were at Holyrood—Charles X. and the Duchesse d'Angoulême, and the Duchesse de Berri and her daughter, the Duc and Duchesse de Guise and the Duc de Polignac.... The Duchesse d'Angoulême and the Duc de Polignac used to go down to the bridge in the glen and stay there for hours: they said it reminded them so much of France, the trees and the water. The Duc de Polignac said our picture of the leave-taking of Louis XVI. and his family contained figures more like than any he had seen elsewhere. We turned it to the wall and locked the door when they came, for fear the Duchesse d'Angoulême should see it, but the little Mademoiselle de Berri was playing hide-and-seek through the rooms, and she got in by the outer door, and it was the first thing she observed, and she insisted on seeing it.... She did me a little drawing, and left it behind her.
"'The family were very fond of coming here, because my father, Lord Wemyss, had been kind to them when they were here during the first Revolution. On the Duchesse de Berri's birthday, she was asked what she would like to do in honour of it, and she chose a day at Saltoun. It was very inconvenient their all coming with the children at a few hours' notice, such a large party, but she wrote a pretty note, saying what a pleasure it would be to see her old friends again, and another afterwards, saying what a delight it had been, so that we were quite compensated.'
"On Sunday, when it was church-time, Lady Ruthven said, 'We'll just gang awa to the kirk and see what sort of a discoorse the minister makes; and if he behaves himself, well—we'll ask him up to dinner!' She sat in kirk, with her two dogs beside her, in a kind of chair of state just under the pulpit, where she might have been mistaken for the clerk. She is as demonstrative in church as elsewhere, and once when Miss Fletcher came unexpectedly into the gallery after she had been some time without seeing her, she called out, 'Eh, there ye are, Minnie, my darling,' before the whole congregation, and began kissing her hands to her. When a child screamed in kirk, and its mother was taking it out, the minister interrupted his discourse with, 'Na, bide a wee: I'm no that fashed wi' the bairn.'—'Na, na,' said the mother, 'I'll no bide: it's the bairn that's fashed wi' ye.' Talking afterwards of the change of feeling with which church-services were usually regarded now-a-days, Lady Charlotte Fletcher said:—