"Touching the editions which you desired, I have given orders to the bookseller on the quay at Rotterdam to send them to you. I shall be glad, indeed, to give you my poor advice on the difficult matters you speak of, if you will do me the return favour of reading through my excursus to Longinus, and giving me your veracious opinion. Of this I send you a copy.
"As regards the Scot I have already spoken of, I may mention for your satisfaction that in person he was tall and thin, with black hair, and the most bronzed skin I have ever seen on a man...."
When I read this letter to Marjory, her eyes were filled with tears, and for myself I would speak to no one on that day.
CHAPTER IX
THE END OF ALL THINGS
I am writing the last words of this tale in my house of Barns after many years have come and gone since the things I wrote of. I am now no more young, and my wife is no more a slim maid, but a comely woman. The years have been years of peace and some measure of prosperity. Here in Tweeddale life runs easily and calm. Our little country matters are all the care we know, and from the greater world beyond there comes only chance rumours of change and vexation. Yet the time has not been idle, for I have busied myself much with study and the care of the land. Many have sought to draw me out to politics and statecraft, but I have ever resisted them, for after all what are these things of such importance that for them a man should barter his leisure and piece of mind? So I have even stayed fast in this pleasant dale, and let the bustle and clamour go on without my aid.
It is true that more than once I have made journeys even across the water, and many times to London, on matters of private concern. It was during one of these visits to Flanders that I first learned the importance of planting wood on land, and resolved to make trial on my own estate. Accordingly I set about planting on Barns, and now have clothed some of the barer spaces of the hills with most flourishing plantations of young trees, drawn in great part from the woods of Dawyck. I can never hope to reap the benefit of them myself, but haply my grandchildren will yet bless me, when they find covert and shade where before was only a barren hillside.
Also in Tweed I have made two caulds, both for the sake of the fish and to draw off streams to water the meadows. In the wide reaches of water in Stobo Haughs I have cut down much of the encumbering brushwood and thus laid the places open for fishing with the rod. Also with much labour I have made some little progress in clearing the channel of the river in places where it is foully overlaid with green weed. The result, I am pleased to think, has been good, and the fish thrive and multiply. At any rate, I can now make baskets that beforetime were counted impossible. My crowning triumph befell me two years ago in a wet, boisterous April, when, fishing with a minnow in the pool above Barns, I landed a trout of full six pound weight.
The land, which had fallen into neglect in my father's time and my own youth, I did my utmost to restore, and now I have the delight of seeing around me many smiling fields and pleasant dwellings. In the house of Barns itself I have effected many changes, for it had aforetime been liker a border keep than an orderly dwelling. But now, what with many works of art and things of interest gathered from my travels abroad, and, above all, through the dainty fingers of my wife, the place has grown gay and well-adorned, so that were any of its masters of old time to revisit it they would scarce know it for theirs.
But the work which throughout these years has lain most near to my heart has been the studies which I have already spoken of. The fruit of them, to be sure, is less than the labour, but still I have not been idle. I have already in this tale told of my exposition of the philosophy of the Frenchman Descartes, with my own additions, and my writings on the philosophy of the Greeks, and especially of the Neo-Platonists—both of which I trust to give to the world at an early time. As this story of my life will never be published, it is no breach of modesty here to counsel all, and especially those of my own family, who may see it, to give their attention to my philosophical treatises. For though I do not pretend to have any deep learning or extraordinary subtlety in the matter, it has yet been my good fate, as I apprehend it, to notice many things which have escaped the eyes of others. Also I think that my mind, since it has ever been clear from sedentary humours and the blunders which come from mere knowledge of books, may have had in many matters a juster view and a clearer insight.