6] He had much to suffer from the sight of his father's
infirmities and from the great change that was about to take place at
the residence he had built, and where he had long lived in so much
prosperity and happiness. But what struck me most was the patient
kindness with which he supported himself under the many fretful
expressions that his sister Anne addressed to him or uttered in his
hearing, and she, poor thing, as mistress of that house, had been
subject, after her mother's death, to a heavier load of care and
responsibility, and greater sacrifices of time, than one of such a
constitution of body and mind was able to bear. Of this Dora and I were
made so sensible, that as soon as we had crossed the Tweed on our
departure, we gave vent at the same moment to our apprehensions that her
brain would fail and she would go out of her mind, or that she would
sink under the trials she had passed and those which awaited her.

[6] In pencil--This is a mistake, dear Father. It was the following
evening, when the Liddells were gone, and only ourselves and Mr. Allan
present.

On Tuesday morning, Sir Walter Scott accompanied us, and most of the
party, to Newark Castle, on the _Yarrow_. When we alighted from the
carriages, he walked pretty stoutly, and had great pleasure in
revisiting these his favourite haunts. Of that excursion, the verses,
'Yarrow Revisited' are a memorial. Notwithstanding the romance that
pervades Sir Walter's works, and attaches to many of his habits, there
is too much pressure of fact for these verses to harmonise, as much as I
could wish, with the two preceding poems. On our return in the
afternoon, we had to cross the Tweed, directly opposite Abbotsford. The
wheels of our carriage grated upon the pebbles in the bed of the stream,
that there flows somewhat rapidly. A rich, but sad light, of rather a
purple than a golden hue, was spread over the Eildon Hills at that
moment; and, thinking it probable that it might be the last time Sir
Walter would cross the stream, I was not a little moved, and expressed
some of my feelings in the sonnet beginning,

'A trouble, not of clouds,' &c.

At noon on Thursday we left Abbotsford, and on the morning of that day,
Sir Walter and I had a serious conversation, _tete-a-tete_, when he
spoke with gratitude of the happy life which, upon the whole, he had
led. He had written in my daughter's album, before he came into the
breakfast-room that morning, a few stanzas addr