fered to visitors who stay above an hour in any eident[236] person's
house. Wrote letters this evening.

_April_ 4.--Wrote two pages in the morning. Then went to Ashestiel in
the sociable, with Colonel Ferguson. Found my cousin Russell settled
kindly to his gardening and his projects. He seems to have brought home
with him the enviable talent of being interested and happy in his own
place. Ashestiel looks worst, I think, at this period of the year; but
is a beautiful place in summer, where I passed nine happy years. Did I
ever pass unhappy years anywhere? None that I remember, save those at
the High School, which I thoroughly detested on account of the
confinement. I disliked serving in my father's office, too, from the
same hatred to restraint. In other respects, I have had unhappy
days--unhappy weeks--even, on one or two occasions, unhappy months; but
Fortune's finger has never been able to play a dirge on me for a quarter
of a year together.

I am sorry to see the Peel-wood, and other natural coppice, decaying and
abridged about Ashestiel--

'The horrid plough has razed the green,
Where once my children play'd;
The axe has fell'd the hawthorn screen,
The schoolboy's summer shade.'[237]

There was a very romantic pasturage called the Cow-park, which I was
particularly attached to, from its wild and sequestered character.
Having been part of an old wood which had been cut down, it was full of
copse--hazel, and oak, and all sorts of young trees, irregularly
scattered over fine pasturage, and affording a hundred intricacies so
delicious to the eye and the imagination. But some misjudging friend had
cut down and cleared away without mercy, and divided the varied and
sylvan scene, which was divided by a little rivulet, into the two most
formal things in nature--a thriving plantation, many-angled as usual,
and a park laid down in grass; wanting therefore the rich graminivorous
variety which Nature gives its carpet, and having instead a braird of
six days' growth--lean and hungry growth too--of ryegrass and clover. As
for the rill, it stagnates in a deep square ditch, which silences its
prattle, and restrains its meanders with a witness. The original scene
was, of course, imprinted still deeper on Russell's mind than mine, and
I was glad to see he was intensely sorry for the change.

_April_ 5.--Rose late in the morning, past eight, to give the cold and
toothache time to make themselves scarce, whic