“Bob’m [2] and I went in the phaeton to meet the boys.  They were very successful—­about twelve brace.  The heather was in full blow, and in wet parts the ground white with parnassia.  I never felt such an air—­it made me feel quite wild.  The sunset behind the far hills and reflected in the lonely little shaw loch most beautiful.  When we began our walk there was a fine soft wind that felt as if it would lift one up to the clouds, but before we got back to the little house it had quite fallen, and all was as still as in a desert, except now and then the wild cry of the grouse and black-cock.  Bob’m mad with spirits, and talked nonsense all the way home.  Not too dark to see the beautiful outline of the country all the way.”

[2] Her sister Charlotte, afterwards Lady Charlotte Portal.

Such tired, happy home-comings stay in the memory; drives back at the end of long days, when scraps of talk and laughter and the pleasure of being together mingle so kindly with the solemnity of the darkening country; drives which end in a sudden blaze of welcome, in fire-light and candles, tea and a hubbub of talk, when everything, though familiar, seems to confess to a new happiness.

Here is another entry a few days later: 

“Beautiful day, but a very high, warm real Minto wind.  We wandered out very late and sat under the lime, playing at being at sea, feeling the stem rock above us as we lent against it and hearing the roaring of the waves in the trees.  No summer’s day can be better than such a day and evening as this—­there was a cloudy moon, too, above the branches.  I wish I could express, but I never can, the sort of feeling I have at times—­now more than I ever had before—­which would sound like affectation if one talked of it.  A fine day, or beautiful country, or very often nothing but the sky or earth or the singing of a bird gives it.  One feels too much love and gratitude and admiration, and something swells my heart so that I do not know how to look or listen enough.”

There was another kind of romance, too, in her young life, destined in future to be at times a source of pain and anxiety, though also of keen gratification and permanent pride.  What can equal the romance of politics when we are quite young, when “politics” mean nothing but “serving one’s country” and have no other associations but that one, when politicians seem necessarily great men?  The love-dreams of adolescence have often been celebrated; but among young creatures whose lives give plenty of play to their affections in a spontaneous way, such dreams seldom vie in intensity with the mysterious call of religion or with the emotion of patriotism.  It stands for an emotion which seems as large as the love of mankind, and its service calls for enthusiasm and self-devotion.  The Mintos were in the thick of politics and the times were stirring times.  “Throughout the last two centuries of our history,” says