“From this period” (the time of his residence in the Highlands) “I date my love of mountainous countries.  I can never forget the effect, a few years afterwards in England, of the only thing I had long seen, even in miniature, of a mountain, in the Malvern Hills.  After I returned to Cheltenham, I used to watch them every afternoon at sunset, with a sensation which I cannot describe.”  His love of solitary rambles, and his taste for exploring in all directions, led him not unfrequently so far, as to excite serious apprehensions for his safety.  While at Aberdeen, he used often to steal from home unperceived;—­sometimes he would find his way to the sea-side; and once, after a long and anxious search, they found the adventurous little rover struggling in a sort of morass or marsh, from which he was unable to extricate himself.

In the course of one of his summer excursions up Dee-side, he had an opportunity of seeing still more of the wild beauties of the Highlands than even the neighbourhood of their residence at Ballatrech afforded, —­having been taken by his mother through the romantic passes that lead to Invercauld, and as far up as the small waterfall, called the Linn of Dee.  Here his love of adventure had nearly cost him his life.  As he was scrambling along a declivity that overhung the fall, some heather caught his lame foot, and he fell.  Already he was rolling downward, when the attendant luckily caught hold of him, and was but just in time to save him from being killed.  It was about this period, when he was not quite eight years old, that a feeling partaking more of the nature of love than it is easy to believe possible in so young a child, took, according to his own account, entire possession of his thoughts, and showed how early, in this passion, as in most others, the sensibilities of his nature were awakened.[19] The name of the object of this attachment was Mary Duff; and the following passage from a Journal, kept by him in 1813, will show how freshly, after an interval of seventeen years, all the circumstances of this early love still lived in his memory:—­

“I have been thinking lately a good deal of Mary Duff.  How very odd that I should have been so utterly, devotedly fond of that girl, at an age when I could neither feel passion, nor know the meaning of the word.  And the effect!—­My mother used always to rally me about this childish amour; and, at last, many years after, when I was sixteen, she told me one day, ’Oh, Byron, I have had a letter from Edinburgh, from Miss Abercromby, and your old sweetheart Mary Duff is married to a Mr. Co^e.’  And what was my answer?  I really cannot explain or account for my feelings at that moment; but they nearly threw me into convulsions, and alarmed my mother so much, that after I grew better, she generally avoided the subject—­to me—­and contented herself with telling it to all her acquaintance.  Now, what could this be?  I had never seen her since her mother’s faux-pas at Aberdeen had been