ving 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 the
cause of her removal to her grandmother's at Banff; we were both the
merest children. I had and have been attached fifty times since that
period; yet I recollect all we said to each other, all our caresses,
her features, my restlessness, sleeplessness, my tormenting my
mother's maid to write for me to her, which she at last did, to quiet
me. Poor Nancy thought I was wild, and, as I could not write for
myself, became my secretary. I remember, too, our walks, and the
happiness of sitting by Mary, in the children's