"Oh, I had been working hard, I told my mother.
"'I know,' she said, 'and I expected to see you wan and pale, dear boy, instead of rosy red.'
"Then I told her all—where I had been, and spread out before her my portfolios of crude unfinished bits.
"'They will work up, and work into noble pictures when I return to town,' I said.
"It was thus I deceived myself and her.
"I next set out to study the beauties of hill scenery of straths and glens, of loch and stream and torrent, of weird pine forests, far in the depths of rugged mountain passes, of sheep and shepherds' shielings, and of everything that makes up the stern silent grandeur of the Scottish Highlands.
"One day I found myself seated high up the glen here with the reek of this same wee village rising blue above the birchen trees, with the great Atlantic Ocean sobbing on the sandy beach, or breaking into whitest foam against that long ridge of darkest rock that runs westward yonder to meet and welcome the rolling seas. There were white clouds afloat in the sky's blue, there were white sails dotting the blue of the sea, there was the buzz of insect life in the heather all around me, and the afternoon was warm and soft. Had I fallen asleep I wonder? I know not. But I started up at last inspired with a new idea.
"It was an idea that made my cheeks tingle with pleasurable emotion.
"I should write a book, a book that would make me famous. I should in this book wed together the harp and the easel, the thistle and the rose.
"Let me explain to you, boys, for I can see you hardly catch my meaning. The book, then, was to embrace both poetry and painting, the wild songs I should sing of my own mountain land; the illustrations all from my own pencil and brush, hence The Harp and the Easel. But the scenery should be touches from Nature in both Scotland and England, hence the title of The Thistle and the Rose.