tc, bestowed on him by the most exalted
worshipers of his genius, hardly to be distinguished under the thick
coat of dust with which the glass was darkened. Poor Anne Scott's
portrait looked dolefully down on the strangers staring up at her, and,
a glass door being open to the garden, Mrs. M---- and myself stepped out
for a moment to recover from the miserable impression of sadness and
desecration the whole thing produced on us; but the inexorable voice of
the housekeeper peremptorily ordered us to return, as it would be, she
said (and very truly), quite impossible for her to do her duty in
describing the "curiosities" of the house, if visitors took upon
themselves to stray about in every direction instead of keeping together
and listening to what she was saying. How glad we were to escape from
the sort of nightmare of the affair!

I returned there on another occasion, one of a large and merry party who
had obtained permission to picnic in the grounds, but who, deterred by
the threatening aspect of the skies from gypsying (as had originally
been proposed) by the side of the Tweed, were allowed, by Sir Adam
Ferguson's interest with the housekeeper, to assemble round the table in
the dining-room of Abbotsford. Here, again, the past was so present with
me as to destroy all enjoyment, and, thinking how I might have had the
great good fortune to sit there with the man who had made the whole
place illustrious, I felt ashamed and grieved at being there then,
though my companions were all kind, merry, good-hearted people, bent
upon their own and each other's enjoyment. Sir Adam Ferguson had grown
very old, and told no more the vivid anecdotes of former days; and to
complete my mental discomfort, on the wall immediately opposite to me
hung a strange picture of Mary Stuart's head, severed from the trunk and
lying on a white cloth on a table, as one sees the head of John the
Baptist in the charger, in pictures of Herodias's daughter. It was a
ghastly presentation of the guillotined head of a pretty but rather
common-looking French woman--a fancy picture which it certainly would
not have been my fancy to have presiding over my dinner-table.

Only once after this dreary party of pleasure did I return, many years
later, to Abbotsford. I was alone, and the tourist season was over, and
the sad autumnal afternoon offering little prospect of my being joined
by other sight-seers, I prevailed with the housekeeper, who admitted me,
to let