The peasants of this wild and primitive neighborhood, though to some extent slightly infected by modernization, are yet very fair specimens of the hardy, trusty clansmen of Scottish history, and the present owners of Slains certainly give them every reason to keep up the old bonds of affectionate interest with every one and everything belonging to “the family.”  To my own observation of the ancient seat of the Hays I owe one of the most delightful recollections of my life, that of a Christian home.  Not only the outward observances, but the inner spiritual vitality of religion, were there, while unselfish devotion to all within the range of her influence or authority marked the character of her who was at the head of this little family kingdom.  The present head of the house, a Hay to the backbone, has triumphantly carried on the martial traditions of his ancestry, and on the roll of England’s victorious sons at the battle of the Alma his name is to be found.  He was there disabled by a wound that shattered his right arm and cut short his military career.  Domestic happiness, however, is no bad substitute for a brilliant public life, and there are duties, higher yet than a soldier’s, that go far toward making up that background of rural prosperity which alone ensures the grand effect of military successes.  After having done one’s duty in the field, it is to the full as noble, and perhaps more patriotic, to turn to the duties of the glebe, thereby finishing as a landlord the work begun as a soldier.

It is a touching custom, hardly yet obliterated in the district over which my reminiscences have led me, for one peasant, when coming upon another employed in his lawful calling, thus to salute him:  “Guid speed the wark!” the rejoinder being, in the same broad Buchan dialect, “Thank ye:  I wish ye weel.”

I can end these pages with no more fitting sentiment.  As a tribute of grateful recollection to those who made my days at Slains a happiness to me, and in the first fresh sorrow of a deep bereavement offered me distractions the more alluring because the more associated with Nature’s changeless, silent grandeur, I pen these lines, crowning them with the homely Scottish wish that wherever they are and whatever they do, “Guid speed the wark!”

LADY BLANCHE MURPHY.

[Footnote A:  There is another version of her courtship, and this a metrical one.  This old ballad was not much known beyond the district round Slains, and the old servants and farmers on the estate were the chief depositaries of the tradition.  I have failed to secure more than a very small fragment of it, which is itself only written down from memory by one of these old women.  The rhyme and rhythm are both original: 

  Lady Mary Hay went to a wedding
  Near the famous town of Reading: 
  There a gentleman she saw
  That belonged to the law....

Here evidently there occurs a hiatus, during which some account is probably begun of her unreturned attachment, for a little later we find in the very primitive manuscript from which we quote these words of the countess: