“Suffice it to say that next day we left Scotland and journeyed south by rail, and I wept—yes, I do not now think it shame to say so, though I struggled then to hide my tears—I wept to cross the border.
“‘It will be such a pleasant change for you, my dear boy,’ said good old Major Walton—for that was the gentleman’s name, and he had quite taken to me after hearing all my story—‘a delightful change indeed after your own bleak, cold, wild hills. We have a very pretty home in Hampshire. You’ll soon forget you were ever anywhere else.’
“The Major’s home was indeed a very nice one; close to the borders of the New Forest it was, and not a great way from the sea.
“But ah! Archie, lad, everything was very foreign to me; the very trees looked strange and uncouth, especially the docked pollards, that stood by the banks of the sluggish streams. The style of the houses was strange to me, and the lingo and talk of the people, who, in my opinion, were terribly ignorant.
“The Major was kindness itself, and so were his wife, her sister, and two children. The major had but one hobby—music. He played the violin himself, and he told me honestly that his chief reason for ‘taking me’—these are his very words—was because I played with such feeling.
“My evenings were happy enough in this English home of mine; my days I spent in the garden, where I was allowed to work, or in the great forest. You must not imagine, Archie, the New Forest is anything like a deer forest in our own land. There are in it no wild mountains, no deep dark dells, no beetling crags and cliffs, no cataracts, no foaming torrents; the red deer does not toss his wide antlers here and fly proudly away at your approach, nor far above you in the sky do you see the bird of Jove circling upwards round the sun.
“Wilson would never have said about the New Forest,—
“‘What lovely magnificence stretches around!
Each sight how sublime, how awful each sound;
All hushed and serene, like a region of dreams,
The mountains repose ’mid the roar of the streams.’