“What are you thinking about, Eddy?”

To which he answered: 

“Oh, always the same ...  Glen! ...”

In all the nine years during which he and I lived there together, in spite of our mutual irascibility of temper and uneven spirits, we never had a quarrel.  Whether we joined each other on the moor at the far shepherd’s cottage or waited for grouse upon the hill; whether we lunched on the Quair or fished on the Tweed, we have a thousand common memories to keep our hearts together.

My father [Footnote:  Sir Charles Tennant, 1823-1906.] was a man whose vitality, irritability, energy and impressionability amounted to genius.

When he died, June 2nd, 1906, I wrote this in my diary: 

“I was sitting in Elizabeth’s [Footnote:  My daughter, Elizabeth Bibesco.] schoolroom at Littlestone yesterday—­Whit-Monday—­after hearing her recite Tartuffe at 7 p.m., when James gave me a telegram; it was from my stepmother: 

“‘Your father passed away peacefully at five this afternoon.’

“I covered my face with my hands and went to find my husband.  My father had been ill for some time, but, having had a letter from him that morning, the news gave me a shock.

“Poor little Elizabeth was terribly upset at my unhappiness; and I was moved to the heart by her saying with tear-filled eyes and a white face: 

“’Darling mother, he had a very happy life and is very happy now ... he will always be happy.’

“This was true. ...  He had been and always will be happy, because my father’s nature turned out no waste product:  he had none of that useless stuff in him that lies in heaps near factories.  He took his own happiness with him, and was self-centred and self-sufficing:  for a sociable being, the most self-sufficing I have ever known; I can think of no one of such vitality who was so independent of other people; he could golf alone, play billiards alone, walk alone, shoot alone, fish alone, do everything alone; and yet he was dependent on both my mother and my stepmother and on all occasions loved simple playfellows. ...  Some one to carry his clubs, or to wander round the garden with, would make him perfectly happy.  It was at these times, I think, that my father was at his sweetest.  Calm as a sky after showers, he would discuss every topic with tenderness and interest and appeared to be unupsettable; he had eternal youth, and was unaffected by a financial world which had been spinning round him all day.

“The striking thing about him was his freedom from suspicion.  Thrown from his earliest days among common, shrewd men of singularly unspiritual ideals—­most of them not only on the make but I might almost say on the pounce—­he advanced on his own lines rapidly and courageously, not at all secretively—­almost confidingly—­yet he was rarely taken in.

“He knew his fellow-creatures better in the East-end than in the West-end of London and had a talent for making men love him; he swept them along on the impulse of his own decided intentions.  He was never too busy nor too prosperous to help the struggling and was shocked by meanness or sharp practice, however successful.